Hammerstein grandson on Oklahoma! — Page 5

OlBlueEyes said: "I guess no one is going to read and comment on the Rich article. The man was the Times theater critic for over a decade and he has access to primary and secondary sources hat we have not.

Oklahoma!was greeted as jingoistic entertainment in 1943, perhaps in part because a wartime audience didn’t want to see that the musical’s celebration of the platonic ideal of Great America was qualified by a brutal acknowledgment of how cruelly America can fall short.

I gave the opinion earlier that while the nation was at war the cast would perform the show in apatriotic and optimistic way and the audiences would receive it in that manner. Few would dare write an article saying that Oklahoma sent a message about the evil of bullying and baiting a poor lonely figure at the bottom of the social ladder. When war breaks out, patriotism and jingoism immediately quadruple in all countries.. No one would ever write about the show, as Rich does, that Oklahoma isguilty of"whitewashing American history. "

Doesn't answer the question of why Oklahoma manydecades after the war would still leave me scratching my head trying to find a reason that Laurie would ever even consider Jud over Curly given the way the two are introduced to the audience.

Riggs, quoted from an article written for a Texas literary journal,

And will it sound like an affectation (it most surely is not) if I say that I wanted to give voice and a dignified existence to people who found themselves, most pitiably, without a voice, when there was so much to be cried out against?

I have not read or seen GGTL. DidRiggs truly came down on the side of Jud, and made sure that the audience got the message that Jud was being mistreated?If so, then if Oklahoma shows Jud as just a villian whose death will leave Oklahoma a better place, then Hammerstein changed the tone of the play orthe cast and the audience refused to play and see Oklahoma as dark.

The character of Jud was a concern of Oscar. He never wanted to eliminate Jud because [t]he drama he provided was the element that prevented this light lyric idyll from being so lyric and so idyllic that a modern theater audience might have been made sleepy, if not nauseous, by it.

Further, Hammerstein wanted to make Jud “acceptable” rather than “a deep-dyed villain, a scenery chewer, an unmotivated purveyor of arbitrary evil.”

So Oscar wanted to keep Jud, not to show him off as a victim of the cruelty of others, but just to make him an "acceptable" villain because he needed someconflict in the production. Jud was not some ordinary criminal, but rather an "arbitrary evil" who just happened to be at the ranch at the wrong time when Curly came and swept away Laurie. Use him to put some action into the story, then toss him out.



Anyway, for those truly interested in this new production of Oklahoma compared to the older productions, I think you will get a lot to think about through this article. It speaks far more than I can.



https://www.vulture.com/2019/04/frank-rich-oklahoma.html"

The weird thing about this piece is that--and I've read others making the same observation--the show seems to want to make the audience feel sorry for Jud. I don't get that. Jud is a sociopath. Jud thinks whatever he wants, he has the right to and goes about trying to do just that, by trying to kill Curley slyly with the Little Wonder, trying to rape Laurie, and when both those things fail, trying to murder them both on their wedding day.

I get that we should understand Jud, grapple with what's going on in his mind--that's just good drama. But feel sorry for him? Nope. Jud isn't a sign that people don't always get the American Dream, as Rich seems to imply here. Jud is a sign that the American Dream isn't about "I get to grab everything for myself because I want it."

I love everything you say here, Gaveston. Great points about "bullying," Laurie being backed into a corner and the range wars being reflected in "The Farmer and the Cowman."

Updated On: 7/15/19 at 03:59 PM

joevitus said: "I love everything yousay here, Gaveston. Great points about "bullying," Laurie being backed into a corner andthe range wars being reflected in "The Farmer and the Cowman.""

Thank you very much for the kind words, Joe. I once planned a doctoral dissertation on OK! and it's impact on the musicals of the next three decades, but never found the time to actually write it. I'm currently doing research for an opera on a real-life, Oklahoma outlaw, so I'm reasonably up on Oklahoma, both the state and the musical play.

Given the length of your posts, Blue, and MINE, and those of a few others, who has had time to get to Frank Rich?

Sir! You are not implying that my excursion into Great Naval Battles of the Pacific was off course?

I'm forcing myself to tweet people just to get in the practice of expressing myself with less verbosity.

I really didn't want to come back here. You have a great love affair with Oklahoma. I don't. I also didn't mean to comment on Rich's comments, although I may have slipped up there. (I broke with Rich when he wrote several columns urging books in a New York bookstore supporting Holocaust Denial be removed and no others let into the country. A guy solidly on the left who was ready to support book burning over free speech when the subject was one on which he was the most passionate.)

I don't doubt that some saw OKLAHOMA! as American cheerleading in 1943, but what is your evidence that it was generally seen as such by educated theatergoers?

I think that Rich's response to that would be to show him the paper trail. Now I realize that Lewis Nichols, who was theater critic for the Times for just three or four years while Brooks Atkinson was away is never going to have a theater named after him like Atkinson and Kerr, but his bland cheerleader review of Oklahoma admits to no darkness.

Next step is to find a collection of reviews, which must already exist somewhere. I ain't doing the research. Also check for reviews of prominent audience members in journals and magazines. If the reaction of a great majority is that Jud is hardly even brought up because he is a shallow, one dimensional villain, then this supports the view that he is not an important part of the musical.

Jud is not merely a device used by Hammerstein to ramp up the conflict while pandering to audience expectations. I'm not sure where all the silliness (I'm not talking about you here, Blue) began about the show ignoring the brutal history of the state. The range wars between cowboys and farmers are clearly, if comically, acknowledged in the aptly named, "The Farmer and the Cowboy". That they "should be friends" is the point of the show.

Call me silly if you like. I've been called much worse. Are you giving proper consideration to the direct quote from Hammerstein in the introduction to a book of his lyrics? He was reluctant to include Jud because he was "heavy fare for a musical play," but knew that he had to leave Jud in because "the drama he provided was the element that prevented this light lyric idyll from being so lyric and so idyllic that a modern theater audience might have been made sleepy, if not nauseous, by it.”

Do you see any desire to preach against the mistreatment of the less fortunate and the consequences that this might have? Is he as anxious about bringing this to the audience as he was about bringing the error of racial prejudice to South Pacific and the equality of women with men, except in time of war when there is a mandatory draft, to King & I?

Like Joe wrote, the poor guy hadn't had a hit since Show Boat. He was worried about appealing to the audience. Opening night was not even sold out. They had to shanghai stray servicemen to fill the theater. The rapturous reviews that greeted R & H the next morning put Oscar back in business again.

In fact, I think that the quotes from Hammerstein in his introduction are dispositive of the issue of Oscar's use of Jud in Oklahoma. He says that he had problems from the beginning on the issue of the inclusion of Jud's character at all because "he was heavy fare for a musical play," but he knew he needed to include Jud less the audience thought that the show was treacle,with no conflicts. He was, if you want to use that term, "pandering" to the expectations of the audience by giving them at least some conflict in the play. Unless someone comes up with contradictory evidence from a source as reliable as the quote from this introduction, I see no wiggle room.


I think that Rich thought that not one percent of the country in 1943 knew anything about the friction between Cowboys and Ranchers in turn of the century Oklahoma. My mother played the OBC constantly and I banged along enthusiastically on the bottom of a tin plant waterer during the climactic anthem.

But "The Farmer and the Cowmen" was just a comic song to me with comic lyrics and a comic brawl brought to a peak when Aunt Eller fires off a shot to get everyone's attention.

Updated On: 7/15/19 at 06:38 PM

Gaveston I never took any offense at your comments about the long posts. I don't think that I've taken offense at anything you said anywhere. I rarely give straight answers to questions when they give me an opening. But I forget that sarcasm and irony and such do not usually signal their presence when passed online. On mobile I like to use emoticons. On computers at times I'll just write in parenthesis (just joking).

When I proofed that post I realized how the long discussion of the U.S. Pacific Fleet was not appropriate, but I left it in anyway. Probably to show off my knowledge as much as anything. So I thought a jab at myself was fitting.

Another reason that it may be difficult to see that someone is joking here is that there is just so little humor on this board. People take everything, especially themselves, so seriously.

I also don't know what your career was, but you are admired and respected for it. I, on the other hand, am not even a good amateur theatergoer, as I only started coming into the city from Nassau County to see shows and concerts about ten years ago to help get through the rough time when I was the sole caretaker of my mother during her descent into dementia (she lived to age 94, so can't really claim that to be tragic, but it was sure no fun).

Even as an amateur theatergoer I was not very good. I just stuck mostly to tried and true revivals. For a while I went to quite a few musicals with a group that met at a tavern on Sunday afternoon and then went to the nearby theater. Most of the new productions that I saw were highly forgettable and are on their way to being forgotten. The Last Ship, If/Then, Gentleman's Guide, Honeymoon in Vegas.

I have the utmost respect for Hammerstein and I bristle when Rich says that Sondheim updated and improved on him, or however he put it. To be a driving force behind Show Boat and Oklahoma. Yet I had read in more than one place how he had had no hits between those two. I know that Irving Berlin, the Gershwins, Jerome Kern and Cole Porter all wrote scores for the Astaire/Rogers films, one of the reasons that they endure, but I knew of no films with which he was connected. Kern and Dorothy Fields collaborated on Swing Time. I know that he and Kern wrote new songs for subsequent productions of Show Boat, stage and screen. They wrote that lushest of ballads, "All The Things You Are" for a flop musical. That song didn't even make it into the overture.

But please don't generalize my comments about Oklahoma to all of Hammerstein's work. Obviously he had already done Show Boat and had hardly ducked controversy or pandered to the audience. I just happen to think, in my non-professional opinion, that their first collaboration did not reach the level of their next two hits. Of the two conditional love songs, "People Will Say We're in Love" is a pleasant duet; "If I Loved You" and the entire bench scene is riveting theater.

Oscar did write that he had a problem from the beginning with inclusion of the Jeeter character because it was something harsh to present to the audience of a musical, and he did write that he nevertheless never wavered in the need to include Jud lest the audience fall asleep, and I believe he said after that he tried to make the character less threatening to the audience.

This just my fuels my opinion and my opinions on such matters are not set in stone. In a summation to a jury I would be certain to remind them who the expert was.

I'll look back at what Oscar did between his huge hits and I might discover some gems.

See, I just ramble on and on if I don't stop myself. This has been a pleasant and informative discussion. I did find a book on Amazon called Opening Night on Broadway: A Critical Quotebook of the Golden Era of the Musical Theatre, Oklahoma! The book is pretty pricey in hardcover but cheap in paperback. It represents that it includes all critics' reviews of all Golden Era musicals from Oklahoma through 1964.

It appears that only excerpts are published. Depending on the length of the excerpts, the book might not be that useful.

https://www.amazon.com/Opening-Night-Broadway-Critical-Quotebook/dp/0028726251/ref=pd_bxgy_14_2/138-0131795-0031559?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=0028726251&pd_rd_r=041355f8-a865-11e9-a02a-55bde3839eb2&pd_rd_w=DEpMP&pd_rd_wg=0zF60&pf_rd_p=a2006322-0bc0-4db9-a08e-d168c18ce6f0&pf_rd_r=FCQ1D7AHC84SX0N3RQ96&psc=1&refRID=FCQ1D7AHC84SX0N3RQ96#customerReviews

Zion44 wrote: 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"

In my earlier post, which you replied to, I stated that the dark side of the show was apparent. This latest revival believes the audience needs to be hit over the head with, what to me, was always obvious.

OlBlueEyes said: "Gaveston I never took any offense at your comments about the long posts...."

Blue, I didn't really think you did, but as you point out, there's always uncertainty when we don't have tone of voice to guide us; I'd rather apologize in advance than accidentally cause hard feelings--especially with a poster I enjoy as much as I enjoy you and your posts.

I think our discussions of WWII were entirely relevant because we were placing OK! in the social and political context at the time it opened.

You have nothing to apologize for re your knowledge of theater. I very much look forward to your posts and if I didn't think they were important, I wouldn't spend so much time reading and responding to them.

Now this is where I get the guitar from the closet and we sing a chorus of "Kumbaya". LOL.

(My own background is as a lyricist/librettist and a lot of years in grad school and teaching at a well-known university. I taught theater history and play analysis, sometimes playwriting, and was often asked to give my 3-hour lecture on the history of musical theater in other courses and as a guest at other universities.

But I'm retired now, at least from teaching, and I made myself a promise when I first came here that I would NOT research online posts as thoroughly as I once researched lectures and published articles. I just don't have the time. So I make no claim to infallibility!)