Right-on retelling turns a classic into Wokelahoma
DOeS the world really need a gritty take on Oklahoma? Well, if this often longfaced revival of the Rodgers and Hammerstein red-neck knees-up is anything to go by, apparently it does.
Daniel Fish and Jordan Fein’s 2019 production was a hit in New York, and has been recreated here more as admonishment than entertainment.
Fair enough that Rodgers’s big, lush orchestral score has been rearranged for a band of eight — it captures the story’s hillbilly twang as surely as a banjo striking a buffalo’s backside. And though they haven’t changed a word of Oscar Hammerstein’s lyrics, or Lynn Riggs’s story, the idea is to stop us bathing in the sunshine of the Midwest, and make us instead lament its violent underbelly.
Anoushka Lucas sings like Norah Jones, but also turns farm girl Laurey into a surly girly strutting about in sexual defiance of predatory males.
In keeping, Arthur Darvill, as guitar-strumming suitor Curly, gives a jagged edge to the show’s cheerful opener Oh What A Beautiful Mornin’, keeping us more in mind of toxic masculinity than cowboy merriment.
THe really dark stuff, though, is embodied in Patrick Vaill’s loner of a hired hand, Jud, who is presented as a rock’ n’ roll suicide in waiting. Some of his scenes are performed in blackouts to emphasise the bleakness of his furtive misogyny.
Thankfully, Marisha Wallace salvages a good bit of fun as Ado Annie — a voluptuous bimbo who is, as her song goes, ‘just a girl who can’t say no’. Stavros Demetraki amuses, too, as the travelling pedlar Ali Hakim who is trying to slither out of a shotgun marriage to Ado and hand her over to knuckle-brain devotee, Will Parker (James Davis).
There are other nice touches, such as the women snapping corn cobs in an unmistakable warning to the men. And the show’s big hoe-down remains a choreographic whirlwind.
The production’s professionalism is not in doubt. Nor is the transformation of the Young Vic into a brightly lit barn with the audience seated either side of a wide-open stage, and a huge back wall presenting the vast prairie landscape.
The message, though, is not to get too comfortable. The American Dream needs to be dug up, denounced and re-buried, as if at a McCarthyite show trial.
The genius of Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals was to redeem that darkness and shine a light on it instead. If producers don’t fancy that, they should write a show of their own.
FOR more uncomplicated mirth, try Barry Humphries. At 88, he remains on wicked form in this evening of anecdotes. They range from growing up drinking tea out of thatchedcottage teapots in Melbourne, to Humphries’s most famous comic creation, Dame edna everage, asking lesbian singer k.d. lang: ‘When did you first know you were Canadian?’
We learn that his camera-shy mother and catty aunts were the inspiration for Dame edna, but of his father, there is little more than footage of a handsome man on a beach.
This was shot on Super-8 by a family friend who we’re told was an amateur filmmaker (‘like Baz Luhrmann’).
After the interval, Humphries sensibly reclines in a leather armchair, commenting on TV clips.
Otherwise, his emu physique is unbowed with age. The Melbourne newspaper’s verdict on his first oneman show 70 years ago still holds good: ‘A nice night’s entertainment.’