Oklahoma! review: Feels like a student show

 Oklahoma! 

Grange Park Opera, Leatherhead, Surrey                                          Until Jul 7

Rating:

Grange Park opened its second season at the magnificent La Scala-inspired ‘Theatre In The Woods’ in Bamber Gascoigne’s Surrey garden with Oklahoma! Good. 

It’s the show’s 75th birthday. After a dodgy out-of-town run under the name Away We Go!, where it was described by one acerbic critic as ‘No legs, no jokes, no chance’, a quick name change and a few more big numbers worked miracles.

It opened on Broadway in March 1943 and ran for a then record-breaking 2,212 performances. Its London run, starting in 1947, was similarly triumphant, with 1,543 performances. The 1955 movie, starring Gordon MacRae and Shirley Jones, and directed by Fred Zinnemann (his only musical), won two Oscars, including Best Music.

 Getting athletic, young, relatively inexperienced, music-theatre-trained performers who need to be able to dance means, perhaps inevitably, that the singing isn’t up to much

 Getting athletic, young, relatively inexperienced, music-theatre-trained performers who need to be able to dance means, perhaps inevitably, that the singing isn’t up to much

So this most celebrated of what I like to call Broadway operas deserves this run out, which most people will thoroughly enjoy. Director Jo Davies puts a well drilled and highly motivated young cast through their paces in another of her fine productions, which, like Opera North’s currently touring Kiss Me, Kate, is traditional in the best way, and never dull.

Her singers also dance, including the ambitious 15-minute Agnes de Mille dream ballet that ends Act I and extends the first act to a truly whopping Wagnerian two hours!

Above: Dex Lee and Katie Hall. To tell the truth, there’s a bit too much of the student show about this one. But I bet you’ll still love it, and if you get a chance to go, don’t pass it up

Above: Dex Lee and Katie Hall. To tell the truth, there’s a bit too much of the student show about this one. But I bet you’ll still love it, and if you get a chance to go, don’t pass it up

In the pit, the BBC Concert Orchestra are conducted by their veteran maestro Richard Balcombe, and they played their way through the many big tunes with great élan.

But there’s a snag. Getting athletic, young, relatively inexperienced, music-theatre-trained performers who need to be able to dance means, perhaps inevitably, that the singing isn’t up to much. Indeed, as perhaps rather crudely miked here, there isn’t a voice I would rush to hear again.

IT’S A FACT

The National Theatre production of 1998 introduced audiences to an actor making his big break outside Australia when Hugh Jackman played Curly. 

 And that does matter in Rodgers & Hammerstein, whose songs can take operatic voices, as Bryn Terfel, Grange Park’s most stalwart supporter, has readily shown in his recordings. When South Pacific opened in New York, the principal bass of the Met, Ezio Pinza, took on the role of Emile. And even when non-operatic singers were engaged by Richard Rodgers, they were artists of the stature of Alfred Drake and Howard Keel, who were terrific singers, as, in the film, were Gordon MacRae and Shirley Jones. Indeed, MacRae was chosen, though older than ideal for Curly, because of his singing ability.

To tell the truth, there’s a bit too much of the student show about this one. But I bet you’ll still love it, and if you get a chance to go, don’t pass it up.

 

 

 

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