Dan Hulbert 27 June 1999 Atlanta Journal and Constitution

Sometimes it takes fresh ears, an ocean away, to hear what great artists have been saying for years. How else to explain the Britons' thrilling, soul-deep understanding of Rodgers and Hammerstein? They've taken hold of those archetypal American gents --- the kindly, cuddly, supposedly conservative uncles of the musical theater --- and shown them back to us as the edgy, hard-muscled visionaries they really were in the 1940s.

Hence the masterful collaborations of producer Cameron Mackintosh and the Royal National Theatre: "Carousel" in 1994, and "Oklahoma!," which Saturday closed its triumphant extension at the Lyceum Theatre. The fact that this joyous production isn't scheduled to come to New York is as tragic and nonsensical as, say, Maurice Chevalier being banned from Paris --- but more on that controversy in a moment.

Hearing "Oklahoma!" with fresh ears begins with production designer Anthony Ward. He's taken the line, "We know we belong to the land/ And the land we belong to is grand" entirely to heart. Ward's set is a dreamlike cyclorama where the rust-red prairie ramps up at the back of the stage and curves into an azure sky. A toy-like farmhouse (smoke curling out of the chimney) gives the illusion of tremendous distances, human fragility framed under divine power.

This isn't the real Oklahoma of 1910: a flat, hard place in every sense. For that's not what composer Richard Rodgers and author/lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II were after when they adapted Lynn Riggs' 1931 play, "How Green Grow the Lilacs." They captured --- in idealized farm girls, in buckaroos so bowlegged they "couldn't stop a pig in the road" --- a fleeting gingham'd innocence that became a cherished myth of national identity.

There's an old joke in the theater that the most unanswerable question is, "Quick, what's 'Oklahoma!' about?" The short synopsis is this: Two guys fight over who'll take a girl to a picnic. A more poetic answer might be --- in Trevor Nunn's haunting, definitive production, anyway --- "The wind comes racing down the plain." Like the wind, the characters are mere visitors to the land, passing by. That motif comes through in wind chimes, the ever-turning windmill, the breathless moment (borrowed from Chekhov, perhaps?) when the company poses for a photographer, trying to freeze the unfreezable.

Of course, motifs aren't what the audience hums at intermission. It's the glorious music: "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'," "People Will Say We're in Love," "Surrey With the Fringe on Top." Having cowboy Curly (Hugh Jackman) sing this last song to Laurey (Josefina Gabrielle), his feistily hard-to-get sweetheart, while seated on a rusty cultivator, is a delightful contrast of reality and dream --- American myth-making in action. Truth to tell, even this well-performed, Curly and Laurey are basically Ken and Barbie on the prairie.

It's Jud (Shuler Hensley), the brutish, glowering farmhand --- who lives in Laurey's smokehouse and looks half smoked himself --- who has evolved over the years from cartoon villain to the most credible, interestingly flawed character. Credit Chris Coleman's 1997 Actor's Express production in Atlanta (with Bryan Davis as the memorable Jud) for advancing this process, which reaches its apotheosis in Hensley. The Marietta-bred actor, who has the majestic voice and presence of a young Orson Welles and won an Olivier Award for this role, is the hulking Dark Side that the American myth tries to deny --- perhaps even the embodiment of a brutal frontier that must be tamed before Curly and Laurey in their surrey can clip-clop into the sunset. Such a Jud gets sympathy in his solo, "Lonely Room." And he exerts a dangerous erotic pull on Laurey even as he murders her sweetheart in the dream sequence. Here, Susan Stroman's gorgeous choreography, based on Agnes de Mille's originals (the first, revolutionary use of ballet in a mainstream musical) makes the case that all of "Oklahoma!" is a dream, and only here does the story reveal its true, subconscious form.

Again, it's not the subconscious that makes audiences cheer --- it's the sheer joy in Stroman numbers that pay athletic homage to American folk dance. It's time for Americans to admit that the last barrier has fallen: The Brits can, on occasion, out-dance us (more evidence: the Broadway-bound "Saturday Night Fever"). Sources close to "Oklahoma!" say, in effect, "Never say never," but as of this writing, the show isn't scheduled to come to New York. In February, the union Actor's Equity, which allows only "stars with international reputations" to be pre-cast in transfers to the United States, denied Mackintosh's request to bring the entire cast to New York. And Nunn did not have time to come to New York and assemble a new company. Since London and New York are such intimately linked theater communities, such union rules are illogical and anti-art. But don't give up hope. Mackintosh's "Miss Saigon" had similar problems reaching our shore, and "Oklahoma!" is an even richer theatrical experience.

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