music by Richard Rodgers book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II based on Lynn Riggs' play Green Grow the Lilacs

Artistic director: Ann-Marie McMahon
Musical director: Barry Ball

Spring is springing, lambs are frisking, birds are nesting - it's the perfect time for "Oklahoma!". This tale of the trials and tribulations of young lovers on their way to married bliss is the perfect antidote to the long nights of winter and the ideal herald of spring. Young couples on the brink of a new life together, living in a territory on the verge of a new era as the 46th state of the union - it MUST be Rodgers and Hammerstein's multi-award-winning "Oklahoma!"

We gratefully acknowledge the support given to participating pupils by The Queen's School and The Nina Gaskill School of Dance.

Synopsis of Scenes and Musical Numbers
The action of this play takes place at the very beginning of the twentieth century in the former Indian Territory now known as Oklahoma.

Act I
Overture

Scene 1 - The front of Laurey's Farmhouse

• 'Oh, What a Beautiful Morning' - Curly
• 'The Surrey with the Fringe on Top' - Curly, Laurey and Aunt Eller
• 'Kansas City' - Will, Aunt Eller, Farmers and Cowmen
• 'The Surrey with the Fringe on Top' - (Reprise) Curly, Laurey and Aunt Eller
• 'I Can't Say No' - Ado Annie
• 'Many A New Day' - Laurey and Girls
• 'It's a Scandal!' - Ali, Farmers, Cowmen and Girls
• 'People Will Say We're in Love' - Curly and Laurey

Scene 2 - The Smokehouse

• 'Poor Jud is Dead' - Curly and Jud
• 'Lonely Room' Jud

Scene 3 - The Front of Laurey's Farmhouse

• 'Out of my Dreams' - Laurey and Girls
• 'Dream Ballet' - Whole Company

Act II

Entr'acte

Scene 1 - The Skidmore Ranch

• 'The Farmer and the Cowman' - Carnes, Aunt Eller and Company
• 'All or Nothing' - Will, Ado Annie and Dancers
• 'People Will Say We're in Love' - (Reprise) Curly and Laurey

Scene 2 - The Front of Laurey's Farmhouse

• 'Oklahoma!' - Company
• 'Oh, What a Beautiful Morning' - (Reprise) Company
• 'Oklahoma!' - (Reprise) Whole Company

'We Know We Belong to the Land '
'With feathers in its hair, war-whooping Oklahoma still rode bareback when nearby Kansas and Texas already had English saddles, Paris hats and Hamlet.' The words of Frederick Simpich, writing in The National Geographic Magazine of March, 1941, give some indication of the special character of the region which gave this musical its name.

The name 'Oklahoma' is derived, in fact, from two Choctaw Indian words: 'okla' meaning 'people'; and 'humma' meaning 'red'. During the nineteenth century the area had been used as a reservation for native American Indians, many of whom had been displaced from their traditional hunting grounds by the ever-growing incursions of white settlers moving west. Many cattlemen also came and leased open range from the Indians. Some married Indian women and thus obtained property rights. As the century progressed, however, pressure was mounting on the American government to release even this territory to white farmers, a state of affairs which resulted in the infamous 'Oklahoma Run' of 1889, when the government finally gave way and white settlers poured in to stake a claim to land in the so-called Indian Territory. This caused the president of one railroad company to write: 'I saw excited men jump from the windows of crowded coaches even before the train came to a stop and rush off to stake out claims in a cornfield that by noon next day was a busy tent of 10,000 people. Drinking water cost as much as beer, and rivals shot it out over claim disputes.' No wonder then that in our play Sheriff Cord Elam can practically cause a riot at a party by exclaiming: 'Why don't those dirt-scratchers go back to Missouri, where they belong?'

Set just after the turn of the century, Oklahoma! the musical finds the region poised on the brink of becoming, in 1907, the 46 th state of the Union, a development which Farmer Ike Skidmore looks forward to with relish as a means of bringing 'the farmer and the cowman and the merchant' to 'behave themselves and act like brothers'. Despite their later track record of dealing frequently with issues of racial and cultural differences - and human sameness - in such shows as South Pacific, The King and I, Flower Drum Song and The Sound of Music , Rodgers and Hammerstein did not significantly pursue the 'Indian question' in Oklahoma! , even though Lynn Riggs, the author of the play Green Grow the Lilacs, on which it is based, was, in fact, of Cherokee blood. Perhaps stirring up controversy was not high on their list of priorities for Rodgers and Hammerstein in their first collaboration. Equally maybe they judged in 1943 that a nation bruised by the recent bombing of Pearl Harbour and America's entry into World War II would respond a whole lot better to a 'feel good' show which declared confidently: 'I've got a beautiful feeling everything's going my way.'

' Out of their Dreams '
'No Gals, No Gags, No Chance!' That was how one reporter summed up his view of Oklahoma! during its pre-Broadway run in New Haven and Boston in the spring of 1943. Indeed, reminiscing some years later, Oscar Hammerstein II himself said: 'As far as the show was concerned, one would wonder how two professionals could make so many mistakes. The chorus girls did not appear until the curtain had been up for about forty minutes. One of our best songs, 'Oh, What a Beautiful Morning', was wasted in the first three minutes of the play while the audience was still being seated. As for the story, the first act is about a girl trying to make up her mind which man, Curly or Jud, will take her to a dance. There is almost no other plot. This show just had to fail.' Perversely, however, Oklahoma! ignored all conventional wisdom and simply refused to die.

The idea of turning Lynn Riggs' play Green Grow the Lilacs into a musical appealed to Richard Rodgers the instant it was first proposed to him in 1942 by Theresa Helburn, the pioneering co-founder and director of the Theatre Guild. Not so to his longstanding collaborator, Lorenz Hart, whose deepening state of alcoholism and depression caused him to take himself off to Mexico for some rest and recuperation. Rodgers' enthusiasm for the project then prompted him to turn to Oscar Hammerstein II, with whom he had discussed the possibility of some collaboration the previous year. By one of the legendary coincidences of show business Hammerstein then revealed that he had himself thought of turning the play into a musical some years earlier and had tried to persuade a reluctant Jerome Kern to work with him on it. Working the opposite way to that he had employed with Lorenz Hart, Rodgers revelled in the luxury of being able to compose the music after he had received the lyrics. 'In all my years of working with Oscar Hammerstein,' he later said, 'I never had an argument.'

Oklahoma! broke the mould not only of American musical theatre but of musical theatre worldwide. Its stubborn refusal to conform to the expected format and its insistence on treating serious social issues (the friction between farmers and cowmen and the reasons behind Jud Fry's malevolence, for example,) made it a landmark production.

Wild audience enthusiasm for the title song during the pre-Broadway run finally persuaded Rodgers and Hammerstein away from other titles under consideration, - such as Away We Go, Swing Your Lady, Cherokee Strip and Yes-sirree - and Oklahoma! opened on Broadway on 31 st March, 1943, where it played to packed houses for five years and nine weeks. Its national touring company was on the road for ten and a half years, playing in one hundred and fifty three cities in the United States and ten in Canada, and its run of 1,548 performances at the Drury Lane Theatre in London established a long-run record for the three-hundred year old theatre until it was eventually overtaken by Lerner and Loewe's My Fair Lady. London audiences, still rooted in the 1930's sophistication of Noel Coward and Ivor Novello, were overwhelmed, and Oklahoma! was thus prominent in the first wave of the one-way transatlantic musical tide that would take three decades to reverse.

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