Porn and triple murder? This ain’t the Oklahoma I recall

Oklahoma!, with its stirring music by Rodgers and Hammerstein, is full of memorable lines. There's the "Oh what a beautiful morning", "the corn is as high as an elephant's eye", "the surrey with the fringe on top", "the farmer and cowman should be friends", and "you're doin' fine, Oklahoma, Oklahoma, okay".

I thought I knew Oklahoma! inside out. Our school, like many others before and since, performed it. I sat in on many rehearsals, and the tunes drilled down into my memory. If I thought about the lyrics at all, I had a vague, pleasing image in my head of an elephant wandering untroubled through the corn fields of frontier America.

A version directed by Rachel Kavanaugh is coming to the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre in Dublin shortly, on a side-trip during its long run through Britain. I go to see it at Wolverhampton's Grand Theatre. Before sitting down to watch the performance in this lovely old theatre, which is along the lines of the Olympia, I read the script for the first time.

Clearly, the version our school had performed was a shortened one. A lot was left out. For instance, the hired hand Jud Fry’s creepy little smokehouse hut, with its walls plastered with pornography, did not feature. Jud is obsessed with Laurey, the feisty young girl who loves another (Curly), and who lives with her Aunt Eller, instead of her absent parents.

Here's some things you might not have known about Oklahoma! In the parlance of the musical, I sure didn't.

Sorry ladies, but 50 is old. Stage directions give you a lot of extra information. We learn Aunt Eller is a "hearty woman about 50". Sadly, she describes herself as an "an ole womern" and "scrawny and old". Belinda Lang, who gives a steely, thoughtful performance as Aunt Eller, tells me that "if you've lived a tough life on the frontier, by the time you're 50, your body has taken a bit of a bashing". Also, Aunt Eller might have had Irish roots; her surname is Murphy.

Sex before marriage

If you have sex with someone in Oklahoma!-Land and you're female, you're expecting marriage.

Ado Annie (the purposefully ditzy Lucy May Barker), who goes "all shaky from horn to hoof" when "a fella talks purty to me", is the girl who can't say no, in the jaunty song Oklahoma! It probably wouldn't carry the same jollity if the lyrics went, "I'm just a boy who can't say no / I'm in a terrible fix. I always say, come on, let's go / Jist when I orta say nix!"

Ado Annie is talking to Laurey (the likeable Charlotte Wakefield) about her feelings for Ali Hakim (Gary Wilmot). He’s the travelling “Persian peddler man”. Were Iranian salesmen working in Oklahoma in 1906, when the musical is set?

Anyway, Ado Annie is hoping that Ali will take her “to the end of the world. Well, if we only drove as fur as Catoosie that’d take to sundown, wouldn’t it? Nen we’d have to go som’eres and be all night together, and bein’ together all night means he wants a weddin’ – don’t it?” she asks Laurey.

“Not to a peddler, it don’t,” replies Laurey.

Gary Wilmot plays Ali as a cheeky chappie, clad in a fantastic green tartan suit. Who does he think the 2015 equivalent of the Ali character might be?

“He’s a bit of a Del Boy. He’s charming, and a born salesman. We never really establish where he’s from,” says Wilmot.

What does he think these lines he says mean, about spending time with women: “If you make one mistake then the moon is bright, / Then they tie you to a contract, so you’ll make it every night”?

“Oh, we’re getting pretty deep here,” says Wilmot. He looks a little alarmed by the question.

Lang is right in with her own answer. “It means that a girl will do anything to make herself honest and legalise sex.”

Murder, they wrote?

Spoiler alert: Jud, the sullen, scary hired hand obsessed with Laurey, who lives in a smokehouse with walls papered with pornography, winds up dead at the end. In this production, he is played with convincing menace by Nic Greenshields. Is his death due to self-defence by Curly? Or murder? No matter; Curly (an assured Ashley Day) skips off unchallenged and free into another "oh what a beautiful morning".

So Jud may or may not have been murdered. But the definite killing in Oklahoma! is a triple murder. We didn't cover this part either in our school musical version of the show. Curly goes to Jud's smokehouse lodgings with a very disturbing mission, which I won't get into.

While he is there, the two of them discuss ways of “gittin’ even” with your enemies. Curly wonders if it’s by shooting someone.

"Nanh! They's safer ways than that, if you use yer brains," scoffs Jud. Then he relates the story of what happened in the Bartlett farm, over by Sweetwater, in a narrative almost as grim as Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, which focuses on the murder of an entire family in a Kansas farmhouse in 1959.

There was a father, mother and daughter on the Bartlett farm. Curly remembers, when Jud mentions them. “Turrible accident. Burnt up the father and mother and daughter.”

“That warn’t no accident,” says Jud. “A feller told me – the h’ard hand was stuck on the Bartlett girl, and he found her in the hayloft with another feller.”

“And it was him who burned the place?” asks Curly.

“It tuck him weeks to git all the kerosene – buying it at different times,” says Jud, who is also a hired hand.

And some light relief

There are some excellent jokes:

• Example one: Curly: "Curly-headed ain't I? And bow-legged from the saddle fer God knows how long, ain't I?" Aunt Eller: "Couldn't stop a pig in the road."
• Example two: Will, who's in love with I-can't-say-no Ado Annie, has a go at his rival, Ali, and comes up with a fine set of insults. "I don't know what to call you. You ain't purty enough fer a skunk. You ain't skinny enough fer a snake. You're too little to be a man, and too big to be a mouse. I reckon you're a rat."

Laurey’s wedding dress

When Laurey marries Curly, there’s a story behind her wedding dress, which the audience would never know

because it’s only revealed in the stage directions. We never hear anything about her parents, so presumably they’re both dead, but the script tells us that she gets married in “her mother’s wedding dress”. Awwww.

[ bordgaisenergytheatre.ie ]