You’re Doing Fine

THE OVERTURE BEGINS, in time-honored fashion, with a trill – the sound of two next-door notes alternating rapidly, giving a sense of uncertainty. It’s a great device that makes the sonority of the ensuing music all the more comforting. In other words, it’s a foretaste of the tension and release that informs all aspects of the drama to come. Even with a so-familiar musical like “Oklahoma!,” we’re encouraged by such devices to suspend disbelief and immerse ourselves in what’s ultimately an entertaining, inspiring show.

Jaelynn Ricks, Jude Emperado, Peter Murphy, 
Jordan Spena, and E. A. Hobbs. 
Photo Credit: Kayleen Bertrand/
The Glimmerglass Festival

With the U.S. celebrating 250 years since its declaration of independence, during a year in which the country’s much-vaunted freedom is so much under attack, the Glimmerglass Festival season opener of “Oklahoma!” whisked us away from those concerns to a time – 1906 – when a number of the rural inhabitants of the Oklahoma Territory were faced with their own issues of anger and reconciliation. It’s a brilliant production, marshalling all the talent and resources Glimmerglass uniquely has to offer: Great cast, great singing, great staging, great set. A great orchestra, led by a masterful conductor. And one of the finest directors in the business.

The musical premiered in 1943, during wartime, and ran for five years, winning a Pulitzer Prize along the way. It was based on a 1931 play by Oklahoman Lynn Riggs, which book-and-lyrics writer Oscar Hammerstein crafted in a sweeping but efficient two acts that, along with Richard Rodgers’s unforgettable music, gave the public a thoughtful story with plenty of fun, even while further changing the conventions of musical theater. 

I write “further” because Hammerstein caused a seismic shift sixteen years earlier with “Showboat,” written with composer Jerome Kern, a piece that also turned from an urban setting with chorus girls to explore a fraught American landscape. “Oklahoma!” is celebrated for its integration of songs and story, but Bolton, Wodehouse, and Kern had been attempting that with their Princess Theatre shows three decades earlier. There’s the matter of putting ballet on the Broadway stage with Agnes de Mille’s choreography, but Rodgers had worked with George Balanchine on four shows during the 1930s. And there’s that quiet “Oklahoma!” opening, as Curley’s voice is heard, unaccompanied, after the overture’s end. Yet something similar opened “The Yeoman of the Guard” in 1888.

None of this takes anything away from the innovations of “Oklahoma!” – it actually underscores how deftly Rodgers and Hammerstein and director Rouben Mamoulian built upon such precedent to present something that seemed absolutely new.

And what helps make the current Glimmerglass production so appealing is that director Francesca Zambello and her creative team are bringing out what lives inside the show, rather than imposing some needless agenda upon the piece. Her approach is to offer it in a way that honors the material’s origins, and she has done this in previous seasons with such musicals as “Candide,” “Porgy and Bess,” “Showboat,” and “West Side Story,” not to mention the operas “La traviata,” “The Crucible,” “Ariadne in Naxos,” and “Madame Butterfly,” the last-named returning this summer. She informs every actor on the stage with a character and a purpose, thus bringing the entirety of the stage picture to life.

Michael Adams and Shereen Pimentel.
Photo by Kayleen Bertrand/
The Glimmerglass Festival

Set designer Peter J. Davison welcomes us to this landscape with a Grant Wood-style curtain illustration of barns and a train, suggesting cultivation and restlessness. The curtain rises on an open stage flanked by farmhouse and barn, with a expanse of field between upon which oil derricks rise portentously in the distance. And a fence, symbolizing the tension between the territory’s ranchers and farmers.

Laurey Williams is a farmgirl, Curly McLain a rancher. That’s not enough to stop their flirting, but Laurey can be acid-tongued, giving a hard edge to her coquettishness. There’s a box social coming up, and Curly sure would like to take Laurey. Michael Adams, as Curly, is movie-star handsome with a winning smile and, of course, a voice to match, as we heard when he opined what a beautiful morning it was a little earlier. 

Costume designer Constance Hoffman starts Laurey (Shereen Pimentel) out in hickory stripe bib overalls and a print blouse, playing a demure appearance against a firecracker personality. It’s very effective. Refereeing the couple is the dependable Aunt Eller. She’s the voice of wisdom, and as such can turn into caricature, but Holly Twyford plays her with command and credibility. We need these characters to bond somewhere beyond the brittle dialogue, and that’s where the song “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top” comes in, allowing Curly to paint a dream-picture that Laurey very much wants to realize despite her stand-offishness. 

Choreographer Eric Sean Fogel, who also served as associate director, is another brilliant, reliable team member, keeping the movement effective throughout the song as the relationship dynamics are explored through character placement even as Adams sings Hammerstein’s clever triple rhymes as if they’d just popped into a cowboy’s head.

In classic musical-theater style, the second leads provide welcome comic relief. Peter Murphy, who plays Will Parker, is an extraordinary dancer with an excellent voice, and stops the show with “Kansas City,” his terpsichorean tribute to the big city, letting him and the dance ensemble run through a number of virtuoso steps that climaxes in a breathtaking tap sequence.

But this is not to neglect Ado Annie, the girl who “Cain’t Say No,” as she musically confesses, perching atop a hay bale to remind us of the other traditional farm use for that vegetation. Kate Morton looks a little too prettily innocent to “knowed what’s right an’ wrong since I been ten,” but that’s part of what makes the character – and Morton’s characterization – so effective. Along with a superb voice and great comic timing.

Members of the Oklahoma! ensemble.
Photo by Kayleen Bertrand/
The Glimmerglass Festival

Each of the two women is courted by another man, representing dramatic dangers. Fixated upon Laurey is Jud Fry, played with snarling menace by Erik Nordstrom, a farmhand who has no friends. When Curly learns of this rivalry, he improbably visits Jud in the smokehouse where he lives, and we overlook that improbability to enjoy the breathtakingly dark duet “Poor Jud is Daid,” staged with a shifting power dynamic as the characters circle upstage and down.

Then there’s the Persian peddler, Ali Hakim, a morals-free foreigner (aren’t they all?) who sweet-talked Ado Annie into thinking he’ll marry her even though she’s engaged to Will Parker. Gregory Sliskovich wears a loud plaid suit (looking as if he just stepped off the Spike Jones bandstand) and oversized fedora, and seems constantly in motion as he woos his cutie and sells his wares. “It's a Scandal! It's a Outrage!” he leads the men in singing as a shotgun wedding seems imminent, concluding “A rooster in a chicken coop is better off ’n men / He ain’t the special property of just one hen!”

How do you give your star-crossed couple a love song when she’s busy refusing him? Hammerstein (who was a lyrics-first songwriter) devised the justly famous “People Will Say We’re in Love,” which gives the kids a little more bonding time even as it allows their antipathy to continue into Act Two. And then it’s the “Out of My Dreams” and Dream Ballet sequence as Laurey imagines a dark romantic destiny. Dance has an ineffable ability to convey desire, and Madison Manning as Dream Laurey and Jordan Spena as Dream Curly were perfect mirrors of the couple, surrounded by an ensemble that deftly mixed dance styles to go with the mixture of pointe shoes and boots we saw on the stage.

Let me single out two more cast members: Troy Cook as Andrew Carnes and Erin Alford as the cackling Gertie. They’re top-notch here and they’re also featured in the Glimmerglass “Madame Butterfly,” my review of which will run in a couple of days.

Alongside all its other merits, this is a festival of American music, far more appropriate to our anniversary than most of the other schlock on tap. Rodgers skillfully synthesized operetta and jazz, advancing the sound of musical theater, and the chromaticism and melodic patterning of this score should call to mind another uniquely American composer: Leonard Bernstein, whose “On the Town” would open on Broadway a year later. 

Trust me when I insist that this production makes the show looks better than ever – better even than the 2017 Glimmerglass production. And the more I see this show, the more I admire the craftsmanship of Rodgers & Hammerstein. James Lowe conducted it here nine seasons ago, and he’s back in front of the virtuoso orchestra for a performance you could as easily enjoy with your eyes closed. But don’t. There’s too much good stuff here to see.

Oklahoma! 
Music by Richard Rodgers
Book & Lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II
Based on the play “Green Grow the Lilacs” by Lynn Riggs
Conducted by James Lowe
Directed by Francesca Zambello
The Glimmerglass Festival, through August 15, 2026