World’s Strangest

This article originally appeared in mental_floss magazine as part of our ‘Masterpieces 101 : A Guide to Works You Should Know’ series.

By Bill Demain

An early review of Oklahoma! predicted, “No legs, no jokes, no chance.” But Rodgers & Hammerstein’s corn-fed masterpiece proved that musicals could be more than ostentatious sets and over-the-top dance numbers.

Oklahoma! opened on a snowy New York night during World War II, in a theater that was cold and half-empty. To fill the vacant seats, producers dragged in off-duty soldiers from the sidewalks. In fact, from the moment Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein concocted the idea for the show, Oklahoma! had been a hard sell. It had no big-name stars and no curvy chorus girls. In short, it was the opposite of a Broadway musical.

When the curtain went up to reveal a lone woman churning butter, the audience was perplexed. For the next two hours, they continued to be puzzled as cowboys spun farm girls through the air and the cast sang praises for carrots, ’taters, and the Oklahoma prairie. But as Rodgers and Hammerstein paced nervously backstage, they heard the audience’s response change from confusion to rapture. By the end, they knew they had a hit. But they didn’t know they had a phenomenon.

The Odd Couple

When Richard Rodgers first met Oscar Hammerstein in 1942, they were both facing major career crises. Rodgers, a composer, was about to lose his lyricist of 25 years, Lorenz Hart. The duo had penned loads of hit songs together, including “My Funny Valentine” and “Blue Moon,” but Hart’s boozing and erratic behavior was driving Rodgers away. Meanwhile, Oscar Hammerstein, the lyricist behind 1920s landmark shows Show Boat and Desert Song, had suffered six straight Broadway flops.

When the new partnership was announced, theater insiders jeered. Not only were Rodgers and Hammerstein both floundering, they seemed totally incompatible. Hammerstein was sentimental and old-fashioned; Rodgers, witty and avant-garde. Hammerstein was level-headed; Rodgers, neurotic. How could it possibly work?

To make matters worse, their first collaboration was to transform the play Green Grow the Lilacs—which had failed on Broadway in 1931—into a musical. The story dealt with Oklahoma settlers in 1906 and focused on a love triangle between a farm girl, a cowboy, and a ranch hand. It also covered a long-standing dispute between farmers and ranchers over who should control the territory. It was a timeless theme, but not exactly the stuff of musical theater.

But the pair believed in the hidden magic of what Hammerstein called “well-defined characters with lots of heart and lots of hope.”

Instead of punching up the dialogue with the fast-paced banter of musical comedy, they let their characters talk naturally, like real country folk. And instead of opening the show with cheap flair, they opted for a more honest approach and let the story dictate how it wanted to begin.

For Oklahoma!, that meant starting off quietly.

The duo continued to buck convention and, instead, put total faith in their talents. Typically, Hammerstein would spend two weeks perfecting the lyrics for Rodgers. Then Rodgers would take about 20 minutes to set them to music. A lightning rod for gorgeous melodies, Rodgers said, “When the lyrics are right, it’s easier for me to write a tune than to bend over and tie my shoelaces.”

The pair’s greatest feat, however, wasn’t the speed with which they wrote songs, but the beauty with which they relayed them. Instead of penning songs to “stop the show,” as in Broadway’s past, Rodgers and Hammerstein made a real effort to use their musical numbers to advance the plot and reveal characters. A three-minute song did the work of eight pages of dialogue, and each number in the score built upon the last. Oklahoma! used “Surrey With The Fringe On Top” to introduce Curly, the romantic, good-natured cowboy who longed to better himself. “People Will Say We’re In Love” showed how Laurey, the strong-willed farm girl, was torn between her domestic duties and her private ambitions. From scene to scene, the music, lyrics, and dialogue were fully integrated in telling the story. In fact, every detail of the production was unified. As Rodgers said, “The orchestrations sound the way the costumes look.”

Unfortunately, all those innovations scared off investors. To find funding, Rodgers and Hammerstein resorted to giving private performances to Park Avenue theatergoers, who often reacted by saying, “A musical about cowboys? Are you kidding?” One of the producers suggested adding Shirley Temple and Groucho Marx to bolster the cast, but Rodgers and Hammerstein bristled at the thought. The duo specifically wanted singers who could act, as opposed to actors who could sing, and they stuck to their guns. That doesn’t mean they weren’t willing to try other things, though. At one point, they added live animals to spice up the show. But after a cow mooed through “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning,” the idea was nixed.

Oklahoma! trudged through out-of-town tryouts in New Haven and Boston, receiving poor reviews across the board. One critique by national columnist Walter Winchell scoffed, “No legs, no jokes, no chance.” Publicly, Rodgers and Hammerstein maintained quiet confidence, but privately, Hammerstein told his wife, “I don’t know what to do if they don’t like this … this is the only kind of show I can write.”

Oh, What A Beautiful Feeling!

At long last, MGM staked $40,000 to open Oklahoma! on Broadway. When the musical premiered on March 31, 1943, it delivered just what war-weary audiences needed—nostalgia for the past, combined with hope for the future. Oklahoma! became Broadway’s first blockbuster, selling out months in advance and creating the business of ticket scalping in the process. Most musicals of the day ran about 400 performances and toured for one year, but Oklahoma! was performed 2,212 times and traveled for 10 years. The original cast recording sold more than 1 million copies, making it standard practice for future musicals to release recordings of their shows.

Rodgers and Hammerstein weren’t the only ones to benefit, though. MGM made good on its investment, too. In return for taking a gamble and fronting the costs, the production company got film rights to the musical, which would later net MGM millions. In fact, the 1955 film version starring Shirley Jones (later of The Partridge Family) won two Oscars, and it had one of the first film soundtracks to go platinum.

Today, Oklahoma! remains one of the most-performed shows in the world, with an estimated 600 amateur and professional performances per year. Since its original run, there have been five major Broadway revivals, including 1999’s Tony Award-winning version starring Hugh Jackman.

In their later years, Rodgers and Hammerstein created eight more classics together, including South Pacific (1949) and The Sound Of Music (1959). But Oklahoma! had the largest influence. It raised the bar for musicals by insisting on songs that furthered the plot and brought characters to light. Sixty-five years after the golden haze first broke on the meadow, the show still enthralls audiences with its simple truth and beauty.

Agnes de Mille: Teaching Cowboys to Twirl Like Ballerinas

Ranch hands and farm girls dancing ballet? Rodgers and Hammerstein doubted it could work. But the prairie pirouettes that Agnes de Mille choreographed for Oklahoma! were a major factor in the show’s success.

During casting, de Mille broke an unwritten Broadway rule by hiring talent over beauty. “Can’t we have girls with pretty legs?” Rodgers protested, but de Mille held fast. If some of her dancers had unconventional looks (one had braces on her teeth), Rodgers eventually found the girls “marvelous and touching.” Audiences did, too.

Onstage, de Mille’s masterstroke was a 10-minute dream ballet that added what she saw as the show’s missing element—sex. When Laurey has to choose who will take her to the box social, the ballet explores her subconscious anxieties with decidedly carnal body language. “Girls don’t dream about the circus … they dream dirty dreams,” de Mille said. The scene was so influential that half of the 80-some musicals opening within the next five years contained dream ballets.

Movie poster image courtesy of FilmPosters.com; program courtesy of ArtTimesJournal.com.

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