by Jake Stigers
When the curtain rose for the first performance of Oklahoma! on March 31, 1943, neither the creative team and actors nor the audience members knew they were literally at a new frontier—if I may grab an obvious metaphor from the source material—of American musical theater. Until then, musicals as the American public knew them were little more than collections of songs, skits, dances and Vaudeville acts assembled loosely around a generic theme—like love, patriotism or beautiful girls with their legs showing—or sometimes no theme at all.
Sixteen years earlier, Florenz Ziegfeld had launched Show Boat, a musical with a defined narrative and loosely contextualized songs by lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II and composer Jerome Kern. It was a radical departure from the entertainment frippery that audiences were used to, and it was well-received enough that it ran for a year and a half. But the songs were written to be catchy and popular more than to drive the narrative, and some even got changed out for new songs that were better suited to new actors over time.
With Oklahoma!, Hammerstein—now working with composer Richard Rodgers—brought this concept to its full fruition; the show’s music and lyrics were fully integrated into the story, and instead of stopping the narrative for the sake of entertainment they advanced the plot, defined the characters and established context. And while some of the show’s musical elements seem quaint or ponderous to modern audiences, the concept at the time was nothing short of an artistic revelation.
Oklahoma! takes place in 1908, sixteen years after Oklahoma was declared a United States territory and one year before it was to become our 46th state. Inspired by Green Grow the Lilacs, a 1930 play that was in turn inspired by a folk song of the same name, Oklahoma! is at its core the story of farm girl Laurie Williams and the two suitors vying for her affections. And while through modern eyes the narrative is problematic in its attitudinal subtexts about women, race and the mentally ill, the story’s overall themes of community, potential and the excitement of destiny will seemingly always resonate with its audiences.
In addition to its blockbuster redefinition of an entire genre, Oklahoma! marked a number of other notable firsts:
It was the first collaboration between Rodgers and Hammerstein. Rodgers’ longtime collaborator Lorenz Hart had fallen into a state of alcoholism and unreliability, and Hammerstein was looking desperately to redeem himself after six consecutive Broadway flops. Theirs ended up being a particularly symbiotic collaboration as well—Hammerstein preferred to write lyrics before any music was composed so he could create the story he wanted, and Rodgers preferred to craft music to fit both the structure and sentiment of completed lyrics—and the two went on to create many iconic musicals together including South Pacific, The King and I, and The Sound of Music.
It was the first musical-by-any-definition choreographed by Agnes de Mille. Her ballet Rodeo, choreographed the previous year to music by Aaron Copland, had pulled her from relative obscurity and brought her to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s attention. She’d constructed Rodeo for the Ballet Russe de Monte-Carlo, an international company that had moved to the United States to compete with the rival company Ballet Theatre (now American Ballet Theatre), and the American-cowboy movement vocabulary she’d created for these classically trained international dancers became a useful foundation for her creation of Oklahoma! De Mille went on to choreograph decades of iconic Broadway musicals, most notably Brigadoon, for which she won the first-ever Tony Award for choreography when the awards premiered in 1947
The show had no stars. In keeping with their revolutionary idea to focus on telling a complete, holistic story through their fully integrated material, Rodgers and Hammersein took a bold step in hiring singers and actors who were dramatically appropriate for the roles instead of bringing in marquee names and bankable stars whose fame could be a distraction from the story’s rural, anonymous, hardscrabble setting.
Oklahoma!—originally titled Away We Go!—had done reasonably well with audiences in its New Haven and Boston tryouts, though producer Mike Todd famously walked out of a performance after the first act and predicted its failure with the words “No legs, no jokes, no chance.” But it was an immediate and overwhelming success on Broadway and ran for 2,212 performances and then toured the country for another ten years. Interestingly, Florence Henderson—the eventual ’70s TV mom Carol Brady—played the ingénue Laurie in the last company on the tour. When she was also cast to play Laurie opposite Gordon MacRae in a 1954 TV tribute to Rodgers and Hammerstein, she was considered a shoe-in to play Laurie opposite MacRae in the 1955 movie. But she lost out to Shirley Jones, the eventual ’70s TV mom Shirley Partridge.
Oklahoma! premiered fifteen months after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and dragged our country from a neutrality to an active participant in World War II. Nobody knew at the time that the war would be over in a year and a half, but the tide had turned for the Allies by the show’s 1943 premiere—and if the country wasn’t feeling completely optimistic, it enthusiastically embraced this musical that was bursting at the seams with the promise of new life and new opportunity and new hope told through the lens of a small town in a territory on the verge of becoming an American state.
Like the theatrical genre telling the story, our country was in the throes of mighty change. And Curly McLain, one of Laurie’s Oklahoma! suitors, sums up the shared Zeitgeist in a particularly joyous speech he makes to her in Act II as he contemplates all the exciting possibilities:
“Oh, things is changin’ right and left! Buy up mowin’ machines, cut down the prairies! Shoe yer horses, drag them plows under the sod! They’re gonna make a state out of this territory, they gonna put it in the Union! Country’s a-changin’, got to change with it!”
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