Forget every Oklahoma! you’ve ever seen. Forget everything you’ve ever heard or said or thought about the 79-year-old classic. Director Daniel Fish’s radically revisionist revival of the Broadway musical that reinvented the genre back in 1943 now feels every bit as revolutionary in 2022 as Rent did in 1994, Spring Awakening in 2006, and Hamilton just a handful of years back.

The story unfolding on the Ahmanson stage remains the same one audiences have been enjoying for nearly eight decades now.

The Rodgers-&-Hammerstein classic still introduces us to cowman Curly (Sean Grandillo) and farmgirl Laurey (Sasha Hutchings), whose flirtatiously barbed words reveal two independent souls clearly made for each other even as hired hand Jud Fry’s (Christopher Bannow) unrequited yearnings promise not-so-clear skies ahead.

Still around for comic relief is Laurey’s hot-to-trot bff Ado Annie (Sis), who simply “Cain’t Say No” either to beau Will Parker (Hennessy Winkler) or to roving peddler Ali Hakim (Benji Mirman).

And though some have (unfairly I believe) deemed Oklahoma! old-fashioned or dated, its blend of the dramatic and the comedic remains timeless, book writer Oscar Hammerstein III having taken Lynn Rigg’s 1930 play Green Grow The Lilacs and complemented it with plot-propelling lyrics set to Richard Rodgers’ unforgettable melodies.

Without changing a word of Hammerstein’s book or lyrics, what a difference a visionary director has made, evidenced from the get-go by a brightly lit stage lined with picnic tables at which those not actively participating in a scene remain throughout a good chunk of Act One, allowing the modern-garbed characters they play to observe Curley and Laurie’s “mating dance” to the tune of “The Surrey With The Fringe On Top” and several more scenes that follow.

Will Parker still extols the pleasures of “Kansas City,” but don’t expect a stageful of chorus boys to join in. Ado Annie still laments her inability to say “No,” but this time round, the song becomes a sex-positive declaration of a woman’s right to choose to say “Hell, yes!” as often as she darn well wishes. And just wait until “Poor Jud Is Daid” has a manipulative Curley messing with Jud’s mind, preamble to a radically restaged final confrontation that blurs the line between good and evil as never before.

 A seven-piece onstage band gives this Oklahoma! a country-and-western sound the Richard Rodgers-Oscar Hammerstein musical has never had before, Hutchings in particular showing off a C-&-W-meets-R-&-B belt in “Many A New Day” and “People Will Say We’re In Love.”

Scott Zielinski’s lighting design choices are among the play’s most striking, whether it’s a sudden shift from broad daylight to absinthe-green mid “The Surrey With The Fringe On Top” as things turn from playful to seductive, or an entire scene played in pitch darkness, the better to allow the taunting words one character speaks to another to sink in.

And by substituting one of this revival’s ubiquitous guns for the weapon traditionally used in a life-or-death confrontation, Fish blurs the line between self-defense and first-degree murder, transforming a celebratory grand finale into something with considerably darker, more violent tones.

Diverse cast choices reveal Oklahoma!’s iconic characters in whole new lights, and in some cases, in whole new hues, most astonishingly in statuesque plus-size black trans actress Sis’s scene-stealingly sensational Ado Annie, a character played on Broadway by a Tony-winning Ali Stoker in a wheelchair, and that Sis now reinvents to “Big, Blonde and Beautiful” effect.

And Sis is given considerable performance competition by Grandillo’s Curley (boy-next-door cuteness masking some pretty cruel intentions), Hutchings’ fiery, feisty, utterly fabulous Laurie, Barbara Walsh’s deliciously dry-witted Aunt Eller, and Winkler’s delightfully dim-witted Will.

Mirman plays Ali Hakim to the hilt as a twangy rascal who’s probably about as “Persian” as his rival Will, and the uniformly terrific Ugo Chukwu (Cord Elam), Hannah Solow (Gertie Cummings), Mitch Tebo (Andrew Carnes), and Mauricio Lozano (Mike) add their own unique shadings along the way.

Perhaps most revelatory of all (next to Sis’s Annie) is Bannow’s stunningly reconceived take on the heretofore vilified Jud, no longer a dark-and-twisted sexual pervert but a hopelessly-in-love loner, whose heartbreaking, gorgeously sung “Lonely Room” proves moving as never before.

This latest Oklahoma! may lack the great big song-and-dance production numbers of its predecessors, but choreographer John Heginbotham does spice things up from time to time with scaled down dance sequences, and his “Dream Ballet” (performed solo by a superb Jordan Wynn) is nothing if not original, though it does require an audience to decipher just what Lead Dancer’s moves are supposed to mean in ways that the more heavily populated Agnes de Mille original never did.

Set designer Laura Jellinek, costume designer Terese Wadden, sound designer Drew Levy, projection designer Joshua Thorson, and special effects designer Jeremy Chernick complete a production design so thoroughly original, each one’s groundbreaking contributions merit their own paragraph, though I’d be remiss not to mention the production’s stunning use of live video.

Last but not least, orchestrator-arranger Daniel Kluger, music director/conductor Andy Collopy, and the Oklahoma! orchestra* make the Best Revival Tony Winner sound as fresh and new as it looks.

Gillian Hassert, Cameron Anika Hill, Hunter Hoffman, Scott Redmond, and Gwynne Wood understudy multiple roles each, and Minga Prather is alternate Lead Dancer.

Mikhaela Mahony is associate director. Daniel Kells is production stage manager. Dhyana Colony is company manager.

A 2018 New York Times article spotlighted three new Oklahoma!s that “stretch[ed] Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II’s groundbreaking musical in unaccustomed directions.”

One featured a pair of same-sex-couple leads. The second resituated the musical in an all-black town. The third was Daniel Fish’s then pre-Broadway Oklahoma!

Though sadly I didn’t get the chance to see either of the first two, I count myself fortunate indeed to have experienced the most revolutionary Oklahoma! of them all.

See it with an open mind and you will likely exit the Ahmanson as overjoyed to be shaken and shattered I was on Opening Night.

*Olivia Breidenthal, Justin Hiltner, Dominic Lamorte, Josh Kaler, Rick Snell, and Caleb Vaughn-Jones

Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N Grand Ave, Los Angeles.
www.CenterTheatreGroup.org

–Steven Stanley
September 15, 2022
Photos: Matt Murphy

Tags: Ahmanson Theatre, Center Theatre Group, Los Angeles Theater Review, Oscar Hammerstein II, Richard Rodgers