If you’ve never seen Rodgers & Hammerstein’s much-beloved “Oklahoma!” — I hadn’t — then Arena Stage’s swell new revival of the 67-year-old musical may surprise you. Not because director (and Arena Stage honcho) Molly Smith has cast people of color in several key roles, including the two main romantic leads. (“The country’s changing, and we got to change with it,” remarks Curly, the kindhearted turn-of-the-20th century farmhand played by Nicholas Rodriguez, near the end of the show.) And not because the songs, performed by a 14-piece orchestra and a cast without a weak set of pipes in the bunch, reverberate thrillingly through the Fitzchandler Theater, the acoustics of which have been given as thorough an upgrade as its appearance.
No, the real delight for anyone who knows the show only by reputation as a high school perennial, is how dark and dirty it is. Though it’s plot-heavy compared to the musicals that preceded it, “Oklahoma!” interrupts those glorious tunes with what is, by modern standards, only a wisp of a story. In this love triangle, one of the two rivals, Jud (the commanding, barrel-voiced Aaron Ramey) is violent and inarticulate, which doesn’t leave a lot of mystery as to which feller will woo Laurey (last-minute replacement Eleasha Gamble, who shines in the role).
But it’s Curly who visits his rival and suggests in toe-tapping song that he hang himself. This is our straight-shootin’ hero? Like I said, dark. Then again, how could Curly not register more favorably when Jud lives in a nudie-picture festooned smokehouse? The fact that it rises out of the floor, like many Arena Stage sets, only makes the sense of it as a “Silence-of-the-Lambs” style dungeon harder to dismiss.
Brighter are the travails of the Persian peddler Ali Hakim, who, through the necessities of propriety, finds himself engaged to Ado Annie, the girl who famously “Cain’t Say No” to the agony of the sweet but dim Will. As Ali, Annie, and Will, Nehal Joshi, June Schreiner and Cody Williams all display an instinctive sensitivity to Hammerstein’s surprisingly subversive comic rhythms, and Parker distinguishes himself as a dancer with a gravity-defying two-step that makes “Kansas City” the energetic peak of Act One. Choreographer Parker Esse takes full advantage of the Fitchandler’s in-the-round configuration, seeming to invite us inside the nucleus of these athletic production numbers, though the gambit backfires in a bizarre “Dream Ballet” that stops the show cold. Get through that, though, and further delights await you on the other side of intermission.
Arena took some heat when it announced it would open its $135 million Mead Center for American Theater with a revival of a classic instead of the kind of progressive offering for which the company was once known. Progressive casting aside, this “Oklahoma!” — which has already set sales records and piqued the curiosity of Broadway producers — looks lovely, sounds better, and beats back any sense of creeping obsolescence. Think you know “Oklahoma!”? Don’t be so sure.
