One might wish for a time machine to travel back to New York City in the very early twentieth century. With the gift of historical perspective, one could gather together three youths growing up at the time but still unknown to one another – George Gershwin (1898 – 1937), Aaron Copland (1900 – 1990), and Richard Rodgers (1902 – 1979) – and set about making introductions. Surely three musically inclined youths, all of Jewish heritage, would have found something to say to one another, conversations that would have been fascinating to hear. Although each would write varied music in their adult careers, all made contributions to the world of opera and musical theater.
Youngest of the three, Richard Rodgers grew up in the borough of Queens where his father, a wealthy physician, enjoyed taking the family to the opera. Richard started studying the piano at age six, and later attended Columbia, then Juilliard (at the time known as the Institute of Musical Art). Before he was twenty, his songs – often with lyrics by Columbia classmate Lorenz Hart – were being included in musical variety shows on Broadway. As their reputations grew, they began to craft entire shows, in which all the words were by Hart and all the music by Rodgers. The 1920s and 1930s were the Rodgers and Hart years, from a Broadway point of view.
Unfortunately, working with Hart grew difficult, due to his problems with alcohol. So Rodgers turned to another old classmate, Oscar Hammerstein II, and launched a new partnership. This newest team would collaborate to create some of the most timeless classics of the Broadway stage: The Sound of Music (1959), The Flower Drum Song (1958), The King and I (1951), South Pacific (1949), Carousel (1945), and Oklahoma! (1943). It is the last of these listed – first chronologically, and their first partnership – that concerns us today.
Oklahoma! derived from a pre-existing light musical play, Green Grow the Lilacs, by Lynn Riggs in which the music was simply an assortment of cowboy songs. Rodgers and Hammerstein felt they could do better, not only musically but dramatically. First, they expanded the tale to make more of the comedic side plot dealing with Ado Annie and her suitors; then, as further counterpoint to the sweetness of the central couple, Laurey and Curly, they created in Jud Fry a villain unusually dark for the lighter venues of musical theater. The result was more multi-faceted than usual musical theater fare of the day, rather in the way that Verdi operas are more multi-faceted than those against which they were competing most of a century before Rodgers and Hammerstein. They thought their audience could handle it, and they were proven right. From the time of its premiere at the St. James Theater in New York March 31, 1943, Oklahoma! ran for over two-thousand performances at the St. James alone, and won a Pulitzer Prize the following year.
Oklahoma! also went further than its competition through its use of dance. Most musical theater of the time used dance as illustration of the setting; in this case, that would imply country dancing and perhaps a square dance or two. Instead, Rodgers and Hammerstein engaged choreographer Agnes de Mille, who one year earlier had worked with Copland on the ballet Rodeo, which premiered at the Metropolitan Opera. She brought to this newest project more classic ballet ideas, not only in the style of the moves, but also in the scope of how ballet would be used. It would be dance not just as visual entertainment but also as character exploration. Thus, in Act One, there is an extended dream ballet in the heroine Laurey imagines a conflict between good and bad: Curly and Jud. We see into her imagination, making the gradual development of the plot that much richer. Modern productions may or may not use de Mille’s original choreography, but still react to the same expressive music. Verdi, too, brought expressive dance into many of his operas.
Some might wonder why an opera company would bother with Oklahoma! Musical theater in an opera house? The fact is that musical theater itself derived from operetta – the newer term coming to be preferred in American theaters in the early twentieth century once “operetta” had come to sound rather old-fashioned. As for operetta, it had come from opera itself, as a lighter version of those grand stage productions, one in which a certain amount of spoken dialog was permitted. So not only Gilbert and Sullivan but also Offenbach and even Mozart wrote operettas; after all, that’s what The Magic Flute is, even though Mozart didn’t yet know that term “operetta” at the time. So Oklahoma! is a twentieth century view of an old tradition, and dating from 1943, actually predates the Britten opera on this summer’s schedule. Oklahoma! had reached England long before Britten composed The Turn of the Screw, so here one finds two contrasting views of what a musical drama can be. Oklahoma! is actually the bigger – and handily the more familiar – of the two.
Notes by Betsy Schwarm
