NEW YORK — Oklahoma!, the exuberant 1943 debut vehicle of the team of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, is in the news these days as the background for Richard Linklater’s film Blue Moon. The starrily cast and highly enjoyable concert version of the iconic musical Jan. 12, intelligently staged by Curtis-trained Shuler Hensley — who won a 2002 Tony playing the piece’s antihero, Jud Fry, on Broadway — formed part of Carnegie Hall’s citywide festival United in Sound: America at 250.
Rob Berman conducted the Orchestra of St. Luke’s with élan and swing, using Robert Russell Bennett’s original orchestrations, which proved a treat to hear from an expert group of players far larger than a Broadway pit, either now or eight decades ago would have accommodated. One of the evening’s compromises, however, was the seemingly now de rigueur over-muscled miking, which (especially early in the evening) played particular havoc with the spoken dialogue.
Fun to have the instrumentalists, including such revered local players as Krista Bennion Feeney (principal second violin) and Myron Lutzke (principal cello), dressed in homespun garb: jeans, plaid shirts, and bandanas. Berman and several players also interacted with the singers, in repartee or adding their bids for the young women’s picnic hampers in the auction scene.
Oklahoma! has not been frequent opera-company fare, though Lyric Opera of Chicago staged it to acclaim in 2013. Glimmerglass will mount it this summer under Francesca Zambello’s direction. This fundamentally optimistic piece (with some dark overtones) has something in common with Bedřich Smetana’s 1866 Prodaná nevěsta (The Bartered Bride). It is a representation by extremely sophisticated urbane professionals — native New Yorkers Rodgers, Hammerstein, and choreographer Agnes de Mille, whose work carried the use of dance in Broadway musicals to a higher, more psychologically telling, plot-integrated level — of the rustic simplicity and virtues that define the nation in a time of a crisis unmentioned in the work.
For Smetana, it was the post-1848 Czech nationalist struggle to reconstruct their identity after centuries of Austrian cultural domination; for the Oklahoma! team, it was the tremendous challenge of the Second World War. The musical — based on Lynn Riggs‘ considerably grittier (and mildly homoerotic) 1931 play Green Grow the Lilacs — portrays everyday life in what was then called Indian Territory, before 1907’s transformative statehood. (Any acknowledgment of a Native American presence is, from today’s point of view, strikingly absent.) As in The Bartered Bride, the resolution of a romantic triangle demonstrates the essential virtues and cunning that fuel progress. The underlying affirmation is: “This is who we are.”
The road from Broadway work to classical work (not the opposite variant — say, Ezio Pinza in South Pacific) has long been trod. Broadway musical cast lists from the 1910s through the 1970s reveal many performers later in opera; a short list would include Grace Moore, Ramón Vinay, Lucille Udovich, Loren Driscoll, Jeanette Scovotti, Reri Grist, Julian Patrick, Hilda Harris, Gregg Baker, and Richard Croft. The original 1943-48 Oklahoma! and its tour through 1954 included future New York City Opera personnel George S. Irving, Helen Baisley, and Patricia Brooks, plus — as Curly — classically trained Alfred Drake, Howard Keel, and John Raitt. Plus, with Jan Kiepura, George London, Walter Cassel, and Giorgio Tozzi all on Broadway in the 1940s, the border between opera and musical “leading man” vocalism was far more porous.
This concert’s Curly, Emmett O’Hanlon, was surely unknown to most of the audience. I’d had the pleasure of hearing his resonant baritone as Malatesta in Berkshire Opera Festival’s 2019 Don Pasquale. Since then, tackling Celtic music as well as opera and musical comedy roles, he’s built up a physique like an action franchise film star and looks and sounds absolutely ready to embody the kind of iconic parts Broadway composers no longer write. Some of O’Hanlon’s line readings needed polish compared to his more seasoned colleagues. Ana Gasteyer’s vibrantly sung and acted Aunt Eller, and (with fewer decibels to command) David Hyde Pierce’s drily commanding Andrew Carnes landed every glance and syllable of their parts. But in his mid-30s, O’Hanlon is a talent one hopes to hear cultivated, not subjected to Phantom-fatigue like some vocally promising predecessors.
A powerful “legit” Curly needed a similarly old-fashioned Broadway ingenue sound — we heard some contenders in the ensemble contributions to “Out of My Dreams” — as Laurey. One of the concert’s problems was the stylistic mismatch of O’Hanlon with the sensitive but quirky and very contemporary-Broadway-sounding Micaela Diamond. Their duet, “People Will Say We’re in Love,” showcased different eras of phrasing. Pre-intermission, she also had particular trouble making the spoken words clear through the over-miking. She’s a fine, sympathetic performer, but this didn’t seem the best use of her talents.
Jonathan Christopher’s well-vocalized Jud — maybe too handsome for the part? — seemed not a lout, nor the brooding “incel” of Daniel Fish’s exhilaratingly sexy Bard Festival-derived staging on Broadway 2019-20, but more a fearful neurodivergent and not such a threat until provoked by Curly’s visit. The strong suit of Fish’s staging — which utilized a brilliantly unorthodox rockabilly arrangement, with not a classical singer in sight — was the decision to deliver Hammerstein’s book not like the cornpone shtick we all grew up with but like the realistic, subtext-laden dialogue of a Clifford Odets or William Inge, with surprisingly poignant results. Here, we largely heard the spoken text in the conventional manner, though Gasteyer brought some fresh insights to bear.
Jasmine Amy Rogers made a phenomenal Broadway debut in April 2025 in the title role of the utterly winning and inventive Boop! The Musical. Playing the irrepressible Ado Annie, she brought along her insouciance, charm, and delightful singing voice: a real star turn, as often happens in this great role. She and the evening’s Will Parker — the reliably expert actor Andrew Durand (who had his own triumphant Broadway leading role last season in Dead Outlaw) — found great chemistry for their scenes and songs together.
Annie and Will are, transparently enough, the comic “second leads,” long a feature of many kinds of music theater. Hammerstein invented the entire Will Parker character and subplot out of a mere mention in Riggs’ play. And Hammerstein might well have had Die Zauberflöte‘s Papageno/Papagena duet in mind in crafting their final duet, “All er Nuthin’,” which similarly ends with the frisky couple talking about possible offspring. Will Parkers too often get styled in the direction of Village Idiot or of Spiffy Specialty Dancer. Durand moved and clowned just fine but kept it real enough to match Rogers in sex appeal and credible rural aura.
Their comic romantic triangle, with the “Persian peddler” Ali Hakim, balances the more tragic one of Laurey, Curly, and Jud. Both involve an “outsider” (ethnic in one case, class-wise in the other) to the community. The treatment of Ali Hakim represents a deflection, on both Riggs’ and Hammerstein’s part, of the then hoary vaudeville stereotype of the “Yiddish peddler”: the equivalent of Black minstrel parts, and played initially by non-Jews and later by Jewish performers breaking into the industry, with shtick, inflections and ad libs to match.
In Riggs’ source play, the part of Ali was taken by none less than later-revered acting guru Lee Strasberg. Oklahoma!‘s long original run featured as Ali Joseph Buloff, Herbert Berghof, and Polish-born Marek Windheim (whose 1929-36 Met Spieltenor career encompassed roles like Mime and Remendado.) Bruce Adler played Ali in the 1979-80 revival. Finally, in 2002-03 Trevor Nunn cast actor Aasif Mandvi in the role. Here, Punjabi-American Parvesh Cheena, a droll TV and movie veteran new to me, dispensed the comedy deftly and sparked good chemistry with Rogers. Still, the song “It’s a Scandal! It’s an Outrage!,” in which Ali fronts the chorus proclaiming, “A rooster in a chicken coop is better off’n men/He ain’t the special property of just one hen,” must be the show’s least palatable number.
