Hammerstein grandson on Oklahoma! — Page 3

broadwayguy2 said: "To the above discussion about Billy Bigelow being an abuser who redeems himself in death, I would like to RESOUNDINGLY challenge that. Billy is given the CHANCE to redeem himself.

Billy hits his daughter and the Heavenly Friend tells him that he is a failure.

The original source material, Lilliom, sees the character EXPLICITLY condemned to hell. It was decided that such an ending, in the time and place in which Carousel came to the stage, would not be appropriate and palatable to the audiences. It is a correct choice, to my mind. That said, NOWHERE does it say that Billy is going to Heaven. People assume that because he leaves with the Heavenly Friend (who JUST told him he failed), and because the SOUND of the final chords of You'll Never Walk Alone is glorious, but the ending is intentionally ambiguous to be palatable to a 1940s Broadway audience who was already unsettled by the material they saw, but still true enough to Lilliom. There is more evidence that Billy is condemned and has not found his salvation.

(and yes, that god awful movie version which dumbed it down and brightened up does a good job of making people think that Billy is gloriously saved.)"

Uh, no. Read the script to the stage version of Carousel. The final scene has Billy redeemed by cheering Louse and Julie, and then led off to Paradise by the Heavenly Friend, with a nod from Dr. Selden/the Star Keeper/God, to the sound of "You'll Never Walk Alone."

Even in Liliom, he isn't definitively damned--he's just going back for more punishment before he can try again (whether he will ever succeed is an open question). But in Carousel, he's most definitely saved.

The movie is terribly executed, but that doesn't mean the ending was changed for it.

Nice write up about her attending a performance with her son, too. She seems to really like it.

I could tell she didn't really care for it. She basically just said she thought the performances were good.

poisonivy2 said: "Did you read the New Yorker article about her attending?"

Yes. Personally, the show as I've heard it described sounds awful, but I'm thrilled that it worked for her and that she was so open to this interpretation.

poisonivy2 said: "I would expect Shirley Jones to have been one of the people who liked it. Or at least was open to it. I read her autobiography and she's a hearty,bawdy, frank woman. Some of the details of her marriages even bordered on TMI. I don't think anything in this production would have offended her."

Same here, really.

Thank you for sharing this, and let me post an update that I downloaded the cast recording this morning, have fallen in love with it maybe more than any other recording of the show I've ever owned (or at least on par with the three other best recordings of the show I own) and now am watching YouTube clips of the production like crazy. I'm desperate to see it. Sad to say, I live in Houston.

I had no idea anyone was even questioning this. It's debatable whether Billy only hit her once--as he says--or if it happened frequently--as Carrie implies and Julie does not correct her over. But, yeah, there is abuse there. It's one of the things that made the show darker, and more complex, and more similar to serious drama in its approach than any musical that had preceded it.

OlBlueEyes, though you are correct about the panic in the immediate aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attack, OKLAHOMA! opened almost 18 months later. By that time the US had decimated the Japanese navy in the Battle of Midway and had held its own in the battle of the Coral Sea. Though the Japanese attempted to strike the American mainland with weather balloons and airplane-launching subs, these efforts went largely unreported to the American public. (A couple of people were killed by the bomb-bearing balloons; the subs with airplanes project (aimed at the Panama Canal) was canceled by the end of the war in 1945.)

Moreover, Oscar Hammerstein actually belonged to a society devoted to creating a worldwide federation based on the US' system of three (executive, legislative, judicial) branches. We may find that comically naive with hindsight, but there's no question it was a serious issue to Hammerstein during and after WWII.

Calling OKLAHOMA! a mere morale booster--like THIS IS THE ARMY and even ON THE TOWN--is simply incorrect. It no doubt served as such to the thousands of servicemen who saw it on their way to Europe, but that was never ALL that it was.

***

As for Roosevelt's failure to bomb the train tracks to Auschwitz, well, hindsight is always 20/20 as they say. But there had been reports of the death camps in British newspapers, culled from interviews with refugees and Resistance fighters. So the likelihood is that Allied governments knew, if not of the "Final Solution", then at least that a system of concentration camps had been constructed.

But that knowledge has to be set in the context of the times. Millions of Central Europeans and Russians had been killed by the German invasion of Poland and the USSR, along with tens of thousands of Brits in the Blitz. The Allies--locked in a life-and-death struggle with totalitarianism--obviously made the decision that the war effort could not be derailed by concerns over collateral damage. The fire bombing of German and Japanese cities--killing tens of thousands of civilians--is sufficient proof of Allied priorities.

It's a lovely fantasy that the Allies could have somehow bombed tracks and dropped paratroopers to liberate the death camps before the falls of Berlin and Tokyo, but it simply wasn't deemed practical at the time. Again, in context, I'm not convinced that is proof of animus against the Jews. In fact, the Allies didn't magically drop in to liberate German POW camps holding thousands of Brits and Yanks either. The camps were liberated, but only when the US or Russian Army arrived in force to support the liberation effort.

***

ETA that the treatment of Jewish refugees by the American government BEFORE the war is something else entirely. We of the USA behaved shamefully, turning back ships full of Jewish refugees to what could only be a terrible fate in Europe. This was no better morally than what we are doing now by imprisoning people fleeing political persecution and drug syndicates in Central America.

Frankly and despite the myths we like to tell ourselves, we Americans have been welcoming to refugees only when we have needed to the cheap labor to keep our economy humming.

Updated On: 7/14/19 at 02:47 PM

Since you brought up naval history, at the end of Midway the U. S. Navy had two fleet carriers in the Pacific: Enterprise and Hornet. Saratoga had no sooner returned from undergoing major repairs in San Diego when it took another torpedo and headed for the repair yard again.

In the Pacific, the 2nd half of 1942 was spent by the Marines and Army regulars recapturing the island of Guadalcanal. This ferocious six month campaign involved a lot of naval action. In August, in the Battle of Santa Cruz, Hornet was sunk by Japanese carrier aircraft. One carrier left, Enterprise and that one tied closely to supporting the men on Guadalcanal.

The Japanese had lost their four most senior fleet carriers at Midway, but Carrier Division Five, the last two fleet carrier veterans of Pearl Harbor, Shokaku and Zuikaku, had not been committed to Midway (if they had been we would have lost). Those carriers along with a newly commissioned one were a formidable force facing only the Enterprise, and the desire to bomb the West Coast to retaliate for the Doolittle raid over Tokyo that had posed a threat to the Emperor was strong.

Of course the military of both countries never knew with certainty the composition of the other's fleet at any particular time, and neither did civilians. But the West Coast residents were nervous about raids.

Of greater importance, the sons and husbands by early 1943 had begun to become casualties in the South Pacific, Africa and the skies over Nazi-occupied Europe. I believe that the daily news of the war forced everything into the background as long as the loved ones were in danger of being killed.

(Hollywood taking another shot at Midway with release due in November. Tricky to film with so many military units engaged in concurrent timelines.)

Why was Oklahoma produced in 1942? I didn't mean to say that Hammerstein conceived the project as a morale booster. That was what it came to be. You know that many servicemen saw the show.

Oscar felt the need to bring Green Grow the Lilacs to the musical stage. Why? I've never heard of Lilacs spoken of as a great piece of literature. I would guess that, with the war in mind, he wanted to show pioneer spirit and the farmers and the cowboys just get along together for the good of all. It would probably not be too difficult to do a little research to pin him down on his reason.

Oscar just needed a hit show, and a top composer to work with. I don't think that he knowingly put anything deep or dark into the play. Even a light show needs some source of friction to engage the characters. Judd played the part of the source of tension and he was just not written well. And when his song is cut, then we have him just as an unfeeling monster. Similar perhaps to Carousel and Billy. Was this show progressive when the Starkeeper helps Billy to understand, in admittedly a couple of short sentences, that Billy is pained to watch Louise in pain, as he understands the feeling. Billy was not brought up by loving parents who passed on to him how to become a loving parent, and he in turn could not handle expressions of love of Louise or even Julie.

Oh, well. Enough verbose pontificating. I just finished a Henry James novel, The Golden Bowl, so now for a week I'll be speaking in long, run-on sentences.

As for the ending of the Oklahoma, would I be too cynical if I ascribed it to shock appeal? Sure, the theatergoer has experienced the quirky nature of the revival and has adjusted to it and might leave feeling positive or negative about it as he or she discussed Ado Annie in a wheelchair. But don't let them just shrug the show off as an interesting or an off-the-mark adaptation. Let them leave the theater feeling some strong emotions of any kind that will keep people talking about it days after.

That last paragraph is far more in your court than mine. As for FDR, I'm generally with you. Bombing the railyard would have been little more than symbolic. To an Eighth Air Force commander, already losing hundreds of airmen on days of heavy raids, every mission and its importance must be explained.

Again, in context, I'm not convinced that is proof of animus against the Jews.

No animus to speak of. But to the leaders, a feeling that it is more important to get home safely as many men under their command as possible. Write as few of those letters to family as possible. "Sure, it's terrible to see these people so mistreated, if this article is accurate, but they are not my responsibility."

If you're looking for a leader who's going to address his men and get them to add three or more more missions that may help the Jews if the story is accurate.... try the other universe down at the corner.

Not saying that a book or play should not be adapted for musicals if it was not a hit. Should not be adapted for musicals if not any good.

GGTL tried out for a month in Boston in 1930, opened in New York and ran for 54 performances and was never heard of again. No, that's not true. But it would have never been heard from again if not for Oklahoma!

http://vconstage.com/the-roots-of-oklahoma-come-alive-in-green-grow-the-lilacs/

The playrite stated that his intentions in writing the play were “solely to recapture in a kind of nostalgic glow the great range of mood which characterized the old folk songs and ballads I used to hear in my Oklahoma childhood.”

No deep dark motives there. Light and fluffy. And Jud, called Jeeter, was the same one-dimensional villain. He is treated marginally better in that Curly after killing him does not turn it into a joke, but apparently faces the possibility of being charged with the crime.

Nothing dark here. (Apparently the playwright in 1930 also did not know that Oklahoma at that time was just a state full of racists.) Where is all that substance people are reading into Oklahoma?

Immigration and the treatment of the indigenous populations the American Indians and the Mexicans. Obviously can't get into this, but if the other major world power all received grades of 'F' in this department, this country might receive a 'D'.

MichelleCraig said: "I first saw OKLAHOMA! in 1979, as a teenager, at the Palace on Broadway. I also saw the revival at the Gershwin in 2002. Even as a teenager, I saw the dark underbelly of this show. I also saw it in the magnificent revival of CAROUSEL at the Vivian Beaumont in 1994.

I, as I believe many of you here, did not have to have the darkness hit me over the head...or have Curly and Laurie spattered with blood at the end of the show to get the point across."

i get a kick out of all these posts describing how they saw Oklahoma! at such and such point, and it wasn't dark, and it wasn't creepy, and the sheer ugliness of the plot didnt "hit them over the head"

Yes, exactly. I dont know what Hammerstein's intentions were, but this is a story about how one dude urges an outcast to kill himself, and then eventually that outcast is killed. The "hero" is then immediately acquitted in a show trial and the entire company then dances and sings joyously over his corpse. My question is not "How did Daniel Fish come up with this" but rather "how is it that the previous musical comedy versions of this disturbing show ever existed?"

That people saw this, loved it, deemed it a classic, is indicative of a societal cruelty that art should unmask. THEY DIDNT CHANGE A WORD and the play is just plain creepy. Thats the whole point.

JDonaghy4 said: "MichelleCraig said: "I first saw OKLAHOMA! in 1979, as a teenager, at the Palace on Broadway. I also saw the revival at the Gershwin in 2002. Even as a teenager, I saw the dark underbelly of this show. I also saw it in the magnificent revival of CAROUSEL at the Vivian Beaumont in 1994.

I, as I believe many of you here, did not have to have the darkness hit me over the head...or have Curly and Laurie spattered with blood at the end of the show to get the point across."

i get a kick out of all these posts describing how they saw Oklahoma! at such and such point, and it wasn't dark, and it wasn't creepy, and the sheer ugliness of the plot didnt "hit them over the head"

Yes, exactly. I dont know what Hammerstein's intentions were, but this is a story about how one dude urges an outcast to kill himself, and then eventually that outcast is killed. The "hero" is then immediately acquitted in a show trial and the entire company then dances and sings joyously over his corpse. My question is not "How did Daniel Fish come up with this" but rather "how is it that the previous musical comedy versions of this disturbing show ever existed?"

That people saw this, loved it, deemed it a classic, is indicative of a societal cruelty that art should unmask. THEY DIDNT CHANGE A WORD and the play is just plain creepy. Thats the whole point."

That's why Oklahoma has been my least favorite of the R & H classics. I don't see any sign of criticism by Oscar of the treatments of Curly and Jud. It is a joke at the end.

Does the fate of the character of Jud or Jeeter, in either GGTL or Oklahoma, offer us a universal lesson, as does South Pacific on racial prejudice, or is it just the sacrifice of one poor loser for the sake of injecting at least some action into the plot?

Kelli O'Hara, a very intelligent woman, growing up Irish Catholic on a farm in Oklahoma (she revealed in an interview that she was ostracized by the mainstream Protestant girls and also that as a preteen she was chubby and plain) was not familiar with South Pacific or Carousel but she loved her Oklahoma.

It would be so interesting to overhear a private conversation between her and Kristin Chenoweth after both had seen this Oklahoma. I would probably subjugate my opinion to their's, if they agreed.

Wouldn't Kelli be expected to see this production when she returned from Japan? To snub it would probably be taken as criticism.

I think that the original New York Times reviews of major shows are available online. I'll read it. But first I have to get out on a lovely summer day.