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by Thomas Hischak
Each of the first three songs in the musical can serve as a vibrant illustration of what makes "Oklahoma!" distinctive.
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Watch a performance excerpt
Performer:
Hugh Jackman |
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While most Broadway musicals opened with a chorus number used to set the scene and begin the show with spectacle, "Oklahoma!" begins quietly, with Aunt Eller churning butter and an offstage voice heard singing "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'." The song is a gentle waltz with a folk flavor, the kind of number a cowboy might sing. Curly sings it to express his own contentment with the world and to attract the attention of Laurey, who is inside the farmhouse. Rodgers' music is flowing and expansive, but there is nothing operatic about it. And Hammerstein's lyric, celebrating how "all the sounds of the earth are like music," introduces one of the themes of the show, love for the land.
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Watch a performance excerpt
Performer:
Hugh Jackman |
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| The free RealPlayer plug-in is required to watch this video. |
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The second song in "Oklahoma!" is "The Surrey with the Fringe on Top," a number that is supposedly about a buggy pulled by white horses, but is really a wooing song in which Curly tries to win Laurey. The song is about an inanimate object, yet it is overflowing with human emotion. It starts out as a rhythm song, the clip-clopping of the horses heard in the music, but soon shifts into a love song and at the end, when Curly describes returning home from the picnic in the moonlight, it takes on the form of a lullaby. The song is so simple and yet so encompassing. Near the end of his life, Hammerstein stated that of the hundreds of songs he wrote in his lifetime, this was his favorite.
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Watch a performance excerpt
Performers:
Jimmy Johnston, Maureen Lipman, and the Boys |
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Finally, consider the first dance number in "Oklahoma!" The ingenious dream ballet at the end of the first act is justly famous, but dance is first introduced in the show in "Kansas City," better remembered as "Everything's Up to Date in Kansas City." Will Parker returns home from a rodeo in Kansas and tells his friends about the city, describing the modern facilities, such as telephones and horseless carriages. Then he demonstrates the kind of dancing he saw in a show there, a two-step and later a ragtime number. He dances not because it is time to dance, but because he needs to dance to continue his story. Soon others are dancing with him, the whole number slipping into a major production number. In the integrated musical, even dance has to grow out of the characters, and "Kansas City" is a wonderful example of the Rodgers & Hammerstein model at work.
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