TO BE OR NOT TO BE... AUTHENTIC
MICHAEL MOFFATT SHOW OF THE WEEK
At the BBC Proms recently, there was a fullystaged version of the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical Oklahoma! According to conductor John Wilson, it was aimed at total authenticity, playing ‘every single note, every last quaver’ of the original score, to capture the magic of the show’s first production in 1943. Wilson – until recently principal guest conductor of the RTÉ Concert Orchestra – has made a speciality of painstakingly reassembling scores and arrangements from recordings of films and musicals whose original scores have been lost. In recent years there have been concert versions of musicals at the Proms but Oklahoma! was the first one fully staged there. It was beautifully sung and danced, rapturously received and raised the whole issue of authenticity in artistic productions.
It’s interesting that when Richard Rodgers was preparing to write the show, Oscar Hammerstein gave him a book of songs of the American southwest to help him get a feel for the music of the area. Having glanced at one song, he closed the book and never looked at it again. ‘If my melodies were going to be authentic, they’d have to be authentic on my own terms,’ he wrote.
Some critics, while admiring the Proms performance, thought that sticking too closely to the original made the production, at over three hours, unnecessarily long. Must a production cling as far as possible to the original to be considered genuinely authentic – and does the original always actually exist? A good example of the problem is another Rodgers musical, Dearest Enemy, written with Lorenz Hart in 1925. After countless changes, it eventually opened in Broadway’s Knickerbocker Theatre that year. Even then, one song had to be dropped. It ran until 1926. Its next production was in 1931 and it wasn’t performed again until 1955 – on television – with lots of other changes.
When it was chosen in 2002 as one of the shows to celebrate the centenary of Richard Rodgers’s birth, it was discovered that much of the original was missing. There were manuscripts in various places, several extra sketches by Rodgers, extra lyrics for a new duet and bits of orchestration. The production team reconstructed everything they could from all the sources, tidying them up and adding new orchestrations. Later, it was all produced as a full show on a CD in 2013. What would be an authentic version of all that?
Of course, there’s nearly always controversy over productions of the classics, especially Shakespeare. If no liberties are taken with the text, critics say it lacks imagination: if things are shaken up a bit they complain of vulgarity. But the texts have been corrupted over the centuries. Shakespeare himself wasn’t a stickler for authenticity – among other anachronisms, he has the clock striking in Julius Caesar.
Producers have also changed texts from the time of Shakespeare, adding to speeches or even changing words. But the characters in his historical plays have the great advantage of being recognisable as politicians of all types and for all times.
Earlier this year a production of Julius Caesar in New York, had Caesar portrayed as a Donald Trump figure, complete with distinctive yellow hair. But since he’s stabbed to death, was that an invitation to do the same to Trump? Some protesters demonstrated loudly at this ‘normalisation of political assassination’. The play is certainly very political but Caesar is killed early on and the rest of the story is about how you stabilise a country after a violent revolt.
I’ve seen a Hamlet where the ghost appeared on a TV screen, Ophelia was cremated and, instead of Hamlet jumping into her grave to hug her corpse, he sprayed her ashes over his head. Imaginative insight or a director on an ego trip? And as far as critics are concerned, it’s worth remembering that when Oklahoma! was being tried out originally in 1943, one major producer dismissed it with the words: ‘No legs, no jokes, no chance.’ Rodgers, enjoying the full houses, later joked: ‘And now no tickets.’
If no liberties are taken with the text, critics says it lacks imagination