A right-on reboot for the new generation: it’s Woke-lahoma!
Oklahoma! Young Vic Theatre Until June 25, 3hrs ★★★★
To my mind, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical has always suffered from a teethitching wholesomeness. This, however, laces the charm with acid. It’s radicalised, sullen as a teenager and pretty right-on. In fact, it’s almost Woke-lahoma!
Yet Daniel Fish’s production, imported from off-Broadway and here co-directed by Jordan Fein, really works.
Besides, the tunes are all intact, the characters present and correct and nobody – a rarity – has changed gender. Faithful to Richard Rodgers’s music, it emerges as something fresh, mad and gripping.
The walls of this small theatre are decorated with a veritable arsenal of rifles. The small, folksy band – with pedal steel guitar for extra twang – is on stage all the time, the conductor waving his hand when he’s not playing the squeezebox.
Who will take lovely Laurie to the box social? Curly, the comely cowboy in leather chaps, or the festering farmhand, Jud?
The cast chew corn and swig cans of beer. They are clearly in the here and now, not stuck in the 1900s where the action is set. Our heroine Laurey (the excellent Anoushka Lucas) is unsmiling and memorably unimpressed with Arthur Darvill’s baffled Curly, Liza Sadovy (fresh from Cabaret) is a ballbuster Aunt Eller (‘Gennelman, shut up!’), Marisha Wallace a bursting Ado Annie, with top Shakespearean actor Greg Hicks as her grim, redneck father.
For laughs, James Davis gives us Will Parker who has the IQ of a cow, while Stavros Demetraki’s pedlar Ali looks uncannily like Borat.
But what horrors this also conjures. The maladjusted Jud is stunningly played by Patrick Vaill as a pallid wisp with the sad, glassy stare of a failed rapist. He’s the American psycho at the core of this version, quietly terrifying,
making the bidding war with Curly for Laurey’s picnic basket electric.
Is it pretentious? Yes, a bit. Notably the prolonged blackouts and arguably the dream ballet with Marie-Astrid Mence prancing to a scorching electric guitar solo – Richard Rodgers meets Jimi Hendrix.
When the cast sing the title song, the rousing hymn to statehood sounds almost sinister. Indeed the show implies a question most revivals never do – whatever happened to the Indians?
There’s something accusatory about this version, which gives the innocent musical a fresh edge.
Especially for youngsters immune to the charm and cheese of the great Broadway musicals, this trail-blazing reboot is a must.