When it’s so plain, why go to Oklahoma?
Oklahoma! (Chichester Festival Theatre) Verdict: Breezy old musical in need of love ★★★✩✩
Oh ChIChESTER, where the wind comes sweepin’ ’cross the Downs. Dry and scorched as an Oklahoma plain. What a week to take us to the steamy south for a roll in the corn!
This old Rodgers and hammerstein standard overwhelmingly concerns the psychosexual shenanigans leading up to the much anticipated ‘box social’.
Will Laurey end up with dashing Curly — or menacing Jud? It’s Love Island, but with saddles. Just as randy, but incredibly repressed and restrained. Well, denim doesn’t have much give, does it?
The set is 90 per cent wooden plank, and it’s all lit with the warm, orange glow of the scorching American South. Which this week, to be fair, Sussex genuinely resembles.
Jeremy Sams’s production is sweet and tuneful, bright and
athletic, but a bit flat when not in the throes of some wild ensemble number. It loves innuendo, but abandons heart. Personally, I blame the central pair.
As Laurey, Amara Okereke has a charming, warbling voice, but couldn’t stir a loin if her life depended on it. Ditto hyoie O’Grady as Curly, the farm boy next-door.
he’s lanky, looks faintly like a surfer and powers through the songs (Ooooooklahoma, Oh What A Beautiful Morning!) like an enthusiastic churchgoer. But where’s the genuine emotion, the soul, the romance?
Thankfully, they’re surrounded by some bright and chirpy turns. Josie Lawrence is the sturdy, stern but subversively fruity Aunt Eller. She has a great way with sideways looks and meaningful glances, plus a deep rumble of a voice that put me in mind of Kirsty Young after a night on the fags.
Watching her wade into the ensemble of dancers, midway through a breathless routine, is a joy.
Scott Karim, too (as the peddler Ali, who is desperate to escape a betrothal), is a welcome piece of comic intelligence.
ThEheft of the set piece dance numbers is something to behold. There are boys head to toe in cowhide, ladies in long white lacy dresses, whipped up to reveal suspenders.
The famous dream sequence, where Laurey imagines marrying Curly only to discover it’s horrible Jud (Emmanuel Kojo) at the altar, is beautifully done with some impressively slick transitions.
But Bronté Barbé steals the
evening as Ado Annie. She, of course, has the best song of the night — ‘ I’m just a girl who can’t say no’.
And she also gets the best lines: ‘I like it so much when a feller talks purty to me...I get all shaky from horn to hoof!’
Plus, she really goes for the gusto. The scenes between her and the besotted Will (tremendous dancer Isaac Gryn) are heartwarming but too brief. To weigh Oklahoma’ s moments of joy against the flatter, slower ones though, is to be left disappointed.
For all the swirling skirts, twirling ropes and stomping boots, my attention wandered (many times); and I saw other sleepy heads bobbing during the slower, less memorable, largely undramatic tunes.
It’s a laugh, it will make you smile but — despite stealing two- and- a- half hours of your leisure time — it won’t leave an emotional mark on you.
And that’s not the reason we go to the theatre.