"Oklahoma!" changed musical theater forever when it opened in 1943 at the St. James Theatre on Broadway, says UNC School of the Arts Chancellor John Mauceri.
And when Mauceri saw a 1957 revival of the musical, it blew him away. Now he's hoping the school's students and patrons will feel the same thrill when the show opens Thursday at the Stevens Center.
With Mauceri as conductor, the all-school production is an attempt to re-create the original as closely as possible, through extensive, meticulous research of all aspects of the show. It's a rare collaboration by all departments of UNCSA.
The production appears to be the first of its kind in the nation, said Theodore Chapin, the president and executive director of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization. The group owns the rights to "Oklahoma!" and other musicals and issues licenses for their revivals.
Chapin said the production will "add an invaluable piece to the performance history of a musical that has long been acknowledged as the one that galvanized an entertainment genre into an American art form."
Mauceri wrote in a recent essay that he had seen the black-and-white photos of the original show before he saw the 1957 revival in New York that used elements from the original production.
"But I was totally unprepared for the color spectrum, for the roiling hills and the eye-popping textures," Mauceri wrote. "I … have longed to experience this again — and share it with the generations of theatergoers who simply never had the chance to see what had been created once upon a time and changed the musical theater world forever."
The fulfillment of this wish has meant keeping artistic decisions in line with those made by the creative team for the first "Oklahoma!" And it has meant replicating or restoring Lemuel Ayers' scenic designs, Miles White's costumes, Agnes de Mille's choreography and Russell Bennett's orchestrations, which will include a rarely used bass oboe. These and other elements contributed to the greatness of Rodgers and Hammerstein's classic.
The story of "Oklahoma" takes place in 1907 and revolves around two love triangles playing out in territory that will soon become part of Oklahoma. It includes such enduringly popular songs as "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'," "People Will Say We're in Love" and, of course, "Oklahoma!"
Among other things, Mauceri hopes that UNCSA's revival will reaffirm the status of "Oklahoma" as "the first American musical to have a single artistic goal in telling its story through music, drama, dance and scenery, elevating the genre into a great collaborative art form, not a medium for separate songs and dances."
Or to put it another way, "Oklahoma" paved the way for the likes of "West Side Story," in which acting, singing and dancing play equal roles in moving that musical's plot forward.
Original performer advising
Gemze de Lappe, 89, is assisting with the "Oklahoma!" production at UNCSA. She danced in the first national tour of the show in 1943 and joined the Broadway production in 1946. She also helped the first British production of "Oklahoma" absorb American qualities as it gradually replaced American performers with British ones.
"'Oklahoma!' was so integrated," she said. "The dancers were really part of the story line in a very specific way. That's why it changed American musicals."
The re-creation has proven to be an unusually ambitious project. It has involved everything from researching documents in the libraries of New York City to following up on leads provided by theater people who found out what UNCSA was doing and wanted to help.
Some cast members in UNCSA's "Oklahoma!" attended a special press event in New York. At the event, Jennifer Webb, who is playing Ado Annie in UNCSA's production, talked with Celeste Holm, the original Ado Annie.
And Rebecca Moyes, who is playing Laurey in UNCSA's production, had an audience with Joan Roberts, the original Laurey.
Roberts, now in her 90s, "is still 100 percent with it," Moyes said. "She's still feisty, and she gave me a ton of advice."
Moyes said Roberts taught her more about her character. "She's actually a very intelligent girl," Moyes said. "Judd is not just a big scary man; he also intrigues Laurey."
Moyes said she also gained a greater appreciation of the subtlety at the heart of the show's humor and relationships.
De Lappe is teaching UNCSA's dancers the choreography that de Mille created, and she is making suggestions at rehearsals.
Terrence Mann, a UNCSA alumnus, is directing "Oklahoma!" He said he was impressed with de Lappe's memory and has come to value it during rehearsals.
"It's fascinating," he said. "She remembers it all. She's still up there doing it. And she knows what she's talking about, and she's specific with everyone. I'm kind of like a passenger on this really cool train. I'm trying to steer it in the right direction."
Revisiting the source
"Oklahoma" ran for more than five years on Broadway and has been restaged innumerable times by amateur and professional groups across much of the world. UNCSA could have followed their footsteps by putting its own stamp on the musical. It has not. Many people involved in the UNCSA production were asked to explain the virtues of doing the re-creation.
Their answers amounted to variations on the same theme — namely that what made "Oklahoma!" so innovative and important has likely fallen into obscurity with each restaging and that a useful way of retrieving that is to revisit the source.
Chapin, of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization, said the production will generate a great deal of interest.
"It's a good thing, after a period of time, to clean the façade of a brilliantly architected building or take a layer of grime off a painting that has been hanging in a museum for 50 or 60 years," Chapin said. "It's usually astonishing as to what's revealed underneath."
Howard Jones, a UNCSA instructor, is serving as the show's scenic supervisor. In his eyes, the collaborative aspect of "Oklahoma!" is even "more important than the design per se." That's because it illustrates a key concept that UNCSA is trying to teach students: All members of a show's creative team come together as one to tell a story.
"Rodgers famously said that the reason he believed 'Oklahoma!' was such a success is that it looked like it had been created by one person," Mauceri said.
This shows up in everything from how colors shift as a character develops to dancing that de-emphasizes physical feats in favor of acting skills.
Mann stressed that UNCSA's "Oklahoma!" will "still have its own feel … because we're in 2011."
That would be fine with Chris Schilder, who earned a bachelor's degree in directing from UNCSA in 2008 and served as a lead researcher in efforts to re-create the 1943 production.
"You have to understand what worked so beautifully so that you can move forward and do your own thing," he said.
De Lappe echoed Schilder's sentiments, saying that innovations in contemporary performances of "Oklahoma" come about "only by enriching what was there — not changing it." She bristles at recent attempts to change Hammerstein's words or to improvise through his script, calling what results "not as carefully crafted" as the original effort.
And she takes issue with a tendency to perk up revivals of "Oklahoma!" and other golden-age musicals by taking them at faster tempos than their composers intended.
"The enrichment (dancers) get from beautifully played music makes them dance better" with clearer, more expressive movements, she said.
Mauceri said he will favor more moderate tempos because they enable Hammerstein's lyrics to be rendered with clarity.
After the curtain
What will happen after the final curtain falls on UNCSA's "Oklahoma!"?
Thorough records will be kept of all the show's elements on a DVD that future generations of creative teams can reference. And film students at UNCSA are making a documentary of the behind-the-scenes work that went into the show.
The film students are part of a rare "all-school" musical at UNCSA, meaning that students from each of UNCSA's five schools are participating. The schools are music, dance, drama, filmmaking and design & production. Usually, productions at UNCSA emanate from one school only, though D&P students are often called in to work on the technical aspects of a dance, drama or opera production.
Mauceri said that the students involved in the show are "one degree of separation away from the source of the very thing that they're hoping to go into." He's hoping that when, like de Lappe, they have reached their 80s, they'll be able to pass on what they've learned from her and others to the next generation of theater performers.
Jennifer Webb, the college senior playing Ado Annie, plans to do just that.
"That's the exciting thing about what we're doing," she said. "We can continue to pass this story on. We have to keep telling it. I hope I can be a part of keeping it going."
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