R&H Oklahoma Revival Tour "Rejection" Article — Page 2

Saw it in New York. Some parts I loved, other parts I thought were awful (one of which was the Dream Baby Dream dancer and the awful costume.). When it played in Alabama and Tennessee it was not sold as a revisionist version and the audience here went in thinking it was your grandmother’s Oklahoma. I have never heard so many complaints and apparently over half the audience left at intermission. I blame a lot on the marketing of the show. It should have never been in the large theaters it played in and I think the marketers feared being up front about its drastic difference.

I doubt that the descendants of people forced off of their land in the Trail of Tears would share your enthusiasm, nor your description of non-white opinion as "basically none".

I think the marketing / advertising was great for this show.

Sure the Bway production had people from the tristate area that didn't like it: it was a daring new version of a classic. Some won't like it.

And of course, there was less adventurous theatre goers on the road. That has always been true and doesn't need to be controversial.

Conservatism is more than one political party, more than politics, and especially in arts, is often a spectrum. I'm sure a deep red place had more artistically conservative theatregoers, but I'm sure deep blue had its share, too. And they would want to see Oklahoma to revisit it, to celebrate it and their memory of it, not re-investigate it and the myth of our country, essentially challenging their memory of Oklahoma. Their not accustomed to that as much and less likely to want to spend money to do that.

None of this is surprising and the very reason many shows don't tour.

Glad he shared this us. The anecdote of the young people finding them, surprising them they had loved it, was especially touching.

It’s completely laughable when people try to pin this as a ‘marketing failure’ and make it a production problem rather than a lazy audience problem.

The trailer, full song clips, photos, promotional materials, etc of this tour (that were shared with every tour city, no ‘gotcha’ trick stops) CLEARLY show this to not be a traditional telling of show. Like, drastically. There’s absolutely no arguing that this video is completely different than the 1955 film currently on Disney+.

You Google the terms “Oklahoma revival tour” and you’re met with phrases on page 1 such as: “reimagining”, “trans actors”, “decidedly dark”, “tour de force of revisionist direction”, “not your grandparents’ Oklahoma”, “radically reimagined”. Nominated for six Tony awards and won Best Revival, including a performance on the awards broadcast. Ran on Broadway for almost a year and was extensively covered by critics prior to its national tour and now West End revival.

Audiences have the entire world of information at their fingertips to know exactly what they’re getting into, but sure, this production really threw them curveball, absolutely no way for everyone and their mother to know exactly what this production is about. What a shame on the marketing team. How deceitful of them! /sarcasm

I’m not even a fan of the show (or any production of it, quite frankly) but this argument is just silly. Lazy consumers who go off of name appeal alone are to blame for their own ignorance.

Oh, and to be clear - I have high doubts that people were walking out midshow or at intermission because the talent onstage weren’t up to snuff for them. I’ve attended over a dozen touring performances of “Wicked” and “The Lion King” in flyover states. You can barely get these people to #AskIfItsEquity let alone care about reliable or consistent talent on stage.


It simply comes down to ignorance and unwillingness to evolve and see things, specifically “patriotic” things, differently than they know them to be. They’re not able to handle being uncomfortable. It’s sh*tty to pin the blame solely on the production rather than admit that audiences can either choose to be informed or choose to be ignorant and angry about it.

I loved the tour cast. I actually preferred Barbara Walsh to Mary Testa. She was sublime. I thought all of the voices were fantastic. As hard as I try, I will never get the Dream Ballet and it does give me headache. It is a polarizing show, but I guess I never expected jeers, boos, thumbs down and noticeable disgust from audience members as the actor describes. That seems really immature on the part of an audience. However, I still see people posting on my local touring houses social media about how much they hated that show and how it shattered their trust in said touring house. The anger is still there.



Leave if you want, but don't antagonize. I've seen plenty of things I don't care for, but I'm there and I paid for it and there might be moments of beauty. I just sit back. At the end, I always give the cast their due. They work hard.

As sad as it is and as much as I don't agree with it, I think touring houses have to think of their core demographic. I think they are torn between the crew that would see Wicked and Mamma Mia every season and the diehard theatre fans who get frustrated whenever there is a repeat show. Some subscribers want to have a feel good escape and others want to see the newest and most cutting edge. It's a hard line to balance. I feel for them.

Seems really hard to please everyone with this revival - you’ve got people who seem to like the concept but not the way it’s executed on tour, you’ve got people who don’t like the changes to this traditional musical, you’ve got people who won’t like the show (ironically) because R&H even in revised form might not appeal. You can see on that west end board this production (which just won Olivier for revival) is similarly polarising.


Personally, I absolutely loved this at the square and it’s one of my fav revivals ever. I will probably catch this in the west end and I’m curious how they stage it on a traditional stage. The only sympathy I have towards ‘the haters’ is I could imagine me not being on board with this type of concept if it’s a property I care about (eg Sondheim).

I also saw it in Providence and yes, the reaction was not good at all. (Though...I've never seen the state as a bastion of liberalism and progressiveness, despite it--very narrowly of late?--remaining a blue one. There's a lot of small-town/small-state mentality here and always has been.) But then, the reaction was clearly not good in MOST MARKETS, and probably progressively worse in the South. A lot of people walked out early in Providence, but no one was yelling abuse at the cast that I saw, and it did get a standing O from those who stayed. (Not a surprise. Literally every show does.)

I am liberal and progressive and keep in the loop on Broadway, and was excited to see a production that had been hailed as so revolutionary and wonderful there... but the appeals didn't translate for me on tour. The cast was good and talented, but ... it was just a weird take. The in-the-dark whispery/zoomed-up-someone's nostrils video confrontation, the very modern dance dream ballet, the blood-spattered ending as people sing about the dream of Oklahoma. Just all of it felt extremely discordant and like a big mess. So I think there are reasons not to like it for creative reasons, beyond any political ones. (I definitely heard praise for Ado Annie's Sis among the exit chatter too.)

Most patrons on tour are seasonal subscribers -- they are not researching shows they think they already know about in March of the previous year when they get their subscription packets. They see 1-2 pictures/short copy in a brochure to look at. You hear "Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma" and you expect something fairly traditional. And even later, I don't know that watching the commercials would've given you much of a clue exactly HOW DIFFERENT this one was. I don't even remember seeing one with those two-second snippets of the zoom video or the dance ballet that was linked above.. The primary image/footage was of the picnic/BBQ, so most people probably just thought it would be a more diverse cast that made it new/revolutionary. If the promo campaign had been more Sweeney Todd than Oklahoma, yeah, that could've tipped most (some) people off. But it wasn't.

It was really interesting to read the cast member's take on it. I'm so glad they had that encounter with those kids who loved it, and hope that went a long way to making it a good experience for them overall. But this show was probably always a long shot to be a mainstream crowd pleaser.

Yeah, I really think this is only a bit about politics and location, and mostly about venue. As others have said, tour subscribers are complacent and buy packages without knowing about the particular productions — partially because they’re conditioned by decades of safe revivals.

If this production had played Manhattan Theatre Club, it would have been a similar disaster. I mean Playwrights nearly had a mutiny over The Flick! If instead of following Annie on tour it had done a few targeted engagements at the Wilma, Woolly Mammoth, Guthrie, etc., it would have been a different story.

Impeach2017 said: "I doubt that the descendants of people forced off of their land in the Trail of Tears would share your enthusiasm, nor your description of non-white opinion as "basically none"."

Lynn Riggs was himself Native American, and he supported the show. I was talking about audiences in general and whether the show was controversial and met with opposition when it premiered. It didn't. Yes, I can imagine there were First Nations people who did not embrace the show. But that is far afield of both my comment and the one I was responding to.

Updated On: 4/6/23 at 08:04 PM

OKLAHOMA! is my favorite musical and Daniel Fish's production was one of my top three favorites.

What I think is so beautiful about the material is that it truly does speak, every single day, to the idealization, the joys, and the fallacies of the American Dream. It is quintessentially American and always and forever will reflect the American attitude of the time.

Daniel Fish gave us the literal America we live in right now. I can understand how many would walk out due to feeling disturbed and not comforted. This essay is super cool in that it seems that although the work was difficult, hopefully the company felt it worthwhile to present this vision of the show.

I would love to see what Daniel Fish would do with THE WIZARD OF OZ.

Updated On: 4/6/23 at 08:38 PM

It's even more toothless than that. Judd (bad guy) shows up to the wedding, he and Curly get into a fight, Judd falls on his own knife, and then a rousing version of the title song. I remember seeing Oklahoma for the first time, a traditional production, and being absolutely dumbfounded THAT was the ending.