Revisiting Oklahoma! (BONUS Premium issue)

Four Broadway Blasts about the pioneering Rodgers & Hammerstein musical

Here are a few thoughts about the great musical Oklahoma! timed for today’s announcement of November’s Golden Age of Broadway survey course (see below):

BROADWAY BLAST: A vocal echo resounds in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!. Curly opens the show’s first chorus with the quick interjection “Oh” (“What a Beautiful Morning,”). The Act Two opener starts with the same interjection, but held longer: “Oh, the farmer and the cowman should be friends.” Finally, near the end of the show the cast sustains a very long O before singing “Oklahoma” in the show’s exuberant title song. It works technically, since O is an easy vowel for singers. But thematically, the repeated sound helps shape a show about the increasing unity of society, going from an individual (Curly) to the community (the farmer and the cowman) to the entire territory (Oklahoma).

BROADWAY BLAST: A close look at the first scene in their first work shows that Rodgers and Hammerstein knew exactly what they were doing when they rev…