‘OKLAHOMA’
THE BILL RAUCH ERA COMES TO AN END WITH A GAY UTOPIA AT OSF by Bob Keefer
W
hen Bill Rauch became artistic director at
the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2007,
one of the first things he did was to validate
my deep love for musical theater by staging
The Music Man.
That was at a time when musicals were essentially
unheard of at the festival. Some mild grumbling was
heard when audiences saw the shyster Harold Hill trying
to seduce Marian the Librarian right there in the Bowmer
Theatre, where non-Shakespeare fare was more likely
to be by Anton Chekhov or August Wilson than Stephen
Sondheim or Meredith Wilson.
Rauch wasn’t deterred. “The American musical is our
country’s largest contribution to world drama,” he told me
in an interview soon after. “It’s important for us to look at
that canon.”
And look he has. Since Music Man, OSF has staged My
Fair Lady, Guys and Dolls, Head Over Heels, The Wiz,
Pirates of Penzance, The Yeoman of the Guard and Into the
Woods. In 2019 it will put on Hairspray.
So it’s fitting that Oklahoma! is, in a sense, Rauch’s
swan song at OSF — the last show he directs before
departing next year to become the artistic director at the
Perelman Center, a new theater being built at New York
City’s Ground Zero.
For me, musicals used to be a guilty pleasure. When I
was a kid growing up in L.A. I was entranced by Richard
Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s shows (which I saw in
those days only in the movie versions) like Carousel, The
King and I and Oklahoma! Even though I loved them I
considered them sappy and quaint, with syrupy romantic
themes worthy of no more serious attention than, say, an
episode of I Love Lucy.
Ah, the arrogance of youth (and the superficiality of
Hollywood, which dumbed down the movie versions I
saw).
Now, with another half century of living behind me, I
see that, beneath all that syrup, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s
best work deals with the dark foundations of American
culture, from racism (South Pacific and King and I) to
crime, punishment and forgiveness (Carousel) and the vital
importance in American life of uniting divided groups who
hate each other, as is the case in Oklahoma!
The show, which opened on Broadway in 1943, is
a monument in theater history. Musical theater had its
roots in turn-of-the-century vaudeville, and early musical
OSF's artistic director Bill Rauch
comedies treated songs as simple breaks in the variety
show. Not until Jerome Kern’s Showboat in 1936 did the
music become part of the fabric of a coherent story.
In Oklahoma! the whole show is seamless, with
song lyrics moving the story along. The show even
includes dance: Act I ends with a wordless 10-minute
“Dream Ballet,” choreographed in the original Broadway
production by Agnes de Mille.
That first production would run for 2,212 performances;
it won Rodgers and Hammerstein a Pulitzer Prize in 1944.
It’s been revived endlessly on stages around the world
and, of course, was made into that 1955 movie of the same
name, which won two Oscars.
The only problem is this: How do you put on a
serious version of Oklahoma! in 2018 and find something
interesting and new to say?
No problem for Rauch, who can be as flamboyantly
creative as The Music Man’s Harold Hill. Rauch’s 2018
season announcement last year ended up in The New York
Times: “Oregon Shakespeare Festival Season Includes a
Same-Sex ‘Oklahoma!’” the headline said.
Same-sex romance in 1906 Oklahoma?
YO U T H
Rauch uses a program note to explain in greater detail.
“The idea of a production with same-sex couples has been
hibernating in my heart for more than a quarter of a century,”
he writes. “Despite the extraordinary social progress that
the LGBTQ2+ community has made, I didn’t believe that I
would see the production I dreamed of in my lifetime.”
His vision of the Oklahoma of the play includes “an
alternative utopian community that reflects progress and
acceptance for our time.”
All this was swirling around my head as I drove
down to Ashland to see Oklahoma! late last month in —
untypically for a critic — a mid-run performance (the show
opened in April at a time I couldn’t go). “Mid-run” means
the audience is comprised not of the wealthy patrons, OSF
board members, company members and theater fans who
jet in from distant cities for opening night shows, but of
ordinary tourists and, in this case, busloads of regional
high school students who fairly mobbed the Bowmer lobby
before the show.
You could hear them chattering nervously away,
giggling about the notion of same-sex cowboy couples in
such a familiar bit of Americana.
Cottage Theatre presents
A cautionary tale of hysteria and persecution
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eugeneweekly.com • June 7, 2018
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