An ‘Oklahoma!’ Revival With a Same-Sex Twist
ASHLAND, Oregon — The idea came to Bill Rauch in the early 1990s: What if he directed a production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Oklahoma!” in which the lovers were same-sex couples?
A gay man in a committed relationship at a time when marriage equality seemed like an impossible dream, he was sure that it would be revelatory. He was equally sure he would never get the rights to stage the musical that way.
For more than 20 years, he did not dare to ask.
But two summers ago at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where he is the artistic director, Mr. Rauch watched a version of his vision unfold. Onstage, actors in costume gave a public reading of an “Oklahoma!” in which Curly and Laurey, the central couple, were women. The secondary romance was between two men, Will Parker and Ado Andy (changed from Ado Annie).
In the audience was Ted Chapin, the longtime overseer of the Rodgers and Hammerstein catalog, who had listened to Mr. Rauch’s nervous pitch and given a cautious go-ahead.
As soon as the performance was over, Mr. Chapin began talking about what sounded like a future for the show.
“I was like, ‘ Wait a minute. We’re still allowed to do this?’ ” Mr. Rauch said. “And he said, ‘Absolutely!’ ”
Mr. Chapin is not averse to smart artistic gambles, and that’s what Mr. Rauch’s “Oklahoma!” — now getting a full production — has turned out to be. Since its April opening in Ashland, it has proved a hit, packing the 600- seat Angus Bowmer Theater, where it runs through October 27.
Timed for the 75th anniversary of the musical’s Broadway opening, the Oregon “Oklahoma!” sticks as close as possible to the original. Altering genders and sexual orientations makes its familiar elements — including Agnes de Mille’s dark dream ballet, where Laurey is stalked by a new kind of dread — reverberate in surprising ways, even as the show makes a case for the notion that love is love.
When Will asks for monogamy from the habitually available Andy, it carries a different charge than when, in other productions, Will asks the same of Annie. Yet an Aunt Eller who is a transgender woman played by a transgender woman, as she is in Mr. Rauch’s staging, is still Laurey’s dear Aunt Eller.
Across the country, other productions are also stretching the groundbreaking 1943 musical in unaccustomed directions. The contemporary director Daniel Fish is staging a pared-back, multimedia “Oklahoma!,” which starts performances September 27 in New York.
Also in September, Chris Cole- man, the new artistic director of the Denver Center for the Performing Arts Theater Company, will stage an “Oklahoma!” set in an all- black town like the ones that existed in the territory around the turn of the 20th century.
The bold reimagining is more than fine with Mr. Chapin, whose job is tending to such classics as “Carousel,” “The King and I,” “South Pacific” and “Cinderella.” Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, he says, took risks with every one of their shows.
“For anybody to think they have to be done in exactly the way they were originally done — I mean, that’s sort of Gilbert and Sullivan thinking,” he said. “And Gilbert and Sullivan is kind of dead.”
Mr. Chapin is the resident expert. The catalog hasn’t been family- owned since 2009, when it was sold to a Dutch company, which in turn sold it last year to Concord Music, an American company.
When Mr. Chapin saw Mr. Rauch’s show, he was pleased: “I sat there thinking, ‘ This couldn’t have happened five years ago. This couldn’t have happened 10 years ago. This is a production for today.’ ”
Mr. Rauch, who will leave the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in about a year to become the founding artistic director of the new Perelman Center in New York, would like his “Oklahoma!” to be a production for tomorrow, too.
“I did say to Bill, ‘There are places in this country that would probably lynch you if you did this,’ ” Mr. Chapin said. “But you know what, maybe not.”