Review: OKLAHOMA! National Tour at Eisenhower Theatre At The Kennedy Center

The National Tour of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! arrived at the Kennedy Center's Eisenhower Theatre this week for a mercifully brief engagement, and shortly before Thursday's performance began, the preshow announcement encouraged audience members to pull out their phones, take a selfie, add a 50th anniversary hashtag, and then silence them. Left unmentioned was that the ensuing three hours would include bizarre theatre, gunshots ringing out in a pitch black theatre, and audience members being showered with kernels of corn and carbonated beverages.

More on that later - let's just cut to the chase.

The Kennedy Center website proclaims, "This is OKLAHOMA! as you've never seen or heard it before - reimagined for the 21st century, and now the Tony winner for Best Revival of a Musical."

Let's be clear: This isn't a "revival" or a "reimagined" production - it's a vivisection of one of the great, cornerstone classics of American musical theatre. It's what you'd get if Andy Warhol and Robert Mapplethorpe dropped acid and decided to re-write Rodgers and Hammerstein.

This ain't your mama's Oklahoma! And it certainly ain't Rodgers and Hammerstein's, either. It's Oklahoma! on acid - a piece of performance art that samples just enough of the original musical to use the name, but any resemblance to the R&H masterwork is purely accidental. Here's a review that's as disjointed and incoherent as this show:

The preshow stage hints at a minimalist approach - rows of unfinished blonde wood picnic tables and folding chairs fill the stage. The back wall has a sepia mural of a large farm, and the side walls are covered with stylized gun racks. Random stacks of blue cans (of beer?) are clustered on various tables. The instruments of the country/bluegrass band (that replaces the traditional orchestra and arrangements) wait just in front of the back wall.

The band takes their places, and the cast files in, draping themselves over tables and chairs around the stage. Curly McLain (Sean Grandillo) saunters in, grabs his guitar, plops down in a chair, strums a few chords, and starts serenading Aunt Eller (Barbara Walsh) with Oh What a Beautiful Mornin'...and that wonderful song fills the hall.

But it's already confusing. Are we in Aunt Eller's kitchen? Why are all these other people here? Are we in the dining hall of a commune? Most of the people on stage are dressed like farmers and cowboys...lots of denim jeans, plaid shirts and cowboy boots. Are we in Oklahoma in 1903? If so, why is one woman wearing a screen printed t-shirt? And why is another wearing a tie-dyed Bob Marley t-shirt and an un-hemmed denim mini-skirt? Are we at the Grand Ol' Opry in 2022? Or are we In the Heights?

Ah...here comes Laurey Williams (Sasha Hutchings), the apple of Curly's eye. A good old fashioned love story will get things back on track. She and Curly are doing the witty, flirting banter from the real Oklahoma! - maybe things will start to make sense. The picnic tables and chairs will be rearranged into The Surry with the Fringe on Top, right?

Nope.

The chairs and tables don't move. The cast just keeps moving awkwardly around them. The unseen, imaginary surrey with the fringe on top just takes us further down the rabbit hole. Curly stops singing long enough to flirt/banter with Laurey, but she's all sass and 'tude, and not having it. So he waves his hand, and suddenly the lights change, and the entire stage is bathed in dark green light.

Why? Why??

I don't think we're in Oklahoma anymore, Toto. Maybe we're in Oz, and Aunt Eller is really the Wicked Witch of the West...or the Good Witch of the North. It's too early to tell.

We learn that the girl in the Bob Marley t-shirt and denim mini skirt is Ado Annie (Sis), and she treats us to a new and interesting take on I Cain't Say No...but the costume disconnect is too jarring...and then she grabs a handheld microphone...and trips over a chair...but covers her awkward, sprawling fall with an improvised joke, picks herself up, and keeps belting...almost, but not quite, with the power of a tent revival singer.

And so it goes.

We meet Jud Fry (Christopher Bannow) - but not the hulking, brooding Jud from back in the day. Bannow's Jud is a more creepy, socially awkward, version. (Played to hint at a cognitive deficit, or mental health issues?) With a brown pageboy and a lilting, yet oddly flat, emotionless delivery Bannow gives a dead-on impression of Johnny Depp in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

And we meet the peddler Ali Hakim (Benj Mirman), the one character that seems true to the original musical. Then there's Gertie Cummings (Hannah Solow), whose entire shtick is an annoying horse laugh, and Ado Annie's daddy, Andrew Carnes (Mitch Tebo) - we know he's a farmer, because he wears a two-tone baseball hat with his overalls.

(By this point, If you haven't seen the show before - or aren't familiar with the movie of the "real" Oklahoma! - you don't have a snowball's chance in heck of following this show.)

Somewhere in the proceedings they do some more songs - People Will Say We're in Love (complete with another incomprehensible light change to a dark red wash) and Pore Jud Is Daid seem vaguely familiar.

And just when you think things can't get any more schizophrenic and weird, Curly and Jud exchange lines for 10 minutes in a pitch dark theatre, punctuated by the first of the heretofore unmentioned (and therefore, very jarring) gunshots. After that, someone with a handheld camera joins them on stage, and their eerily lit faces are projected on the back wall, twenty feet high. (Oklahoma! meets The Blair Witch Project...!)

Other highlights of the first act include Ado Annie opening the tab on one of the beer cans with her teeth, a stagehand (in street clothes and headset) walking on stage in the middle of a scene to clear a prop, cast members drinking from modern, thermal water bottles, and the womenfolk peeling ears of corn, snapping the ears in half (aiming stray corn kernels at the audience as they do), and contemporary rolling coolers being used as props and set dressing.

By the time the first act ends, you're on such an anachronism/time shifting overload, that as the lights come up, you and your companion look at each other and say (in unison), "What the hell was that?"

You use the intermission to take a walk, and clear your head, and return to your seat thinking, "Surely they'll make this all make sense in the second act...right?"

But alas, no.

After an hour of country music (in Act One), the second act starts with screaming, wailing, punk rock/electric guitars (Courtney Love and Hole seemed to have scored the Entracte) and with two fog machines filling the stage with smoke. Agnes DeMille's beautiful Dream Ballet has been scrapped for a lone dancer (in a white sequined mini dress/shirt with "Dream Baby Dream" emblazoned on it) flinging herself around the stage in a fit of interpretive movement. One wouldn't think this could be improved on, but the lights dim and the hand held camera makes yet another appearance, and Lead Dancer Gabrielle Hamilton's face gets the Blair Witch treatment.

Time to sample a little more R&H, with a rousing The Farmer and the Cowman that is refreshingly true to the source material, until someone in the cast shakes one of the blue cans and sprays the first four rows of the audience. (The Kennedy Center website neglected to mention that people in the "spray zone" needed to bring ponchos, like they were coming to a Gallagher show.)

And so (after more drama between Jud and Curly, and love a-bustin' out all over) the show grinds to its conclusion - a rewritten ending that makes a ham-handed attempt at social commentary while casting Jud in a more sympathetic light. It's as disjointed and incomprehensible as the rest of the show. No spoilers here - it wouldn't make sense anyway.

Now, for a more traditional review:

It's a shame that director Daniel Fish (and the other creative geniuses who "reimagined" this production) felt led to take a machete to a show that was good enough to run for 2,200 performances when it debuted on Broadway in 1943. By far the most well-received parts of the performance were the segments of the original musical that survived intact. The audience laughed at the jokes, and the show moved briskly when the cast actually performed Oklahoma! - sadly, the talents of much of the cast are wasted trying to plod through the new material.

Hutchings in particular is shining star. Your eye just finds her, wherever she is on stage. She has incredible stage presence and a lovely voice, and it would be wonderful to see her in a revival that is true to the original Broadway production. Likewise, Mirman's Ali Hakim is a comic standout. His sense of timing and delivery were spot on throughout the evening. Grandillo and Sis, as well as Hennessy Winkler (who played Will Parker) all showed flashes of artistic skill that was woefully underdeveloped.

Likewise, the pared down, country inspired musical accompaniment (and excluding the hideous Entracte) could have been a lovely innovation, had this revival truly been a revival. Acoustic music backing a Dream Sequence that paid more homage to DeMille's ballet would have been a fantastic start to the second act.

Paradoxically, in the post MeToo world, many classic theatre scripts are being reworked (or censored, gutted, cannibalized - take your pick), specifically to eliminate anything that might offend or trigger any audience members. But this "new" version of the show seems to have missed the memo - the second act features Will selling Ali a pair of furry handcuffs and a lacy bra, more non-consensual kissing than you can count (and even more semi-consensual kissing/groping/fondling, but overacted to the point of being cringe inducing), and Curly telling Laurey, "now stop worrying, or I'll spank you." It's almost like the producers doubled down on the misogyny and objectification - the "box lunch social" was one double entendre away from being a key-party-on-the-prairie.

Here's the bottom line: If you're one of those people who like to rave about "fresh, new, cutting edge, avant garde performance art" go see the show that shares a name with Rodgers and Hammerstein's seminal work. (And smugly inform the rest of us that we "don't get it.")

But if you want to see the Oklahoma! that Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote - and share it with your children or grandchildren - skip the national tour and stream or rent the Gordon MacRae and Shirley Jones movie version. It's a true classic.

Running time is 2:50, with intermission.

For more information about the Kennedy Center, click here.

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