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LikeHamilton, too,Oklahoma!was deemed artistically revolutionary for its time.
The production shocked me, moved me, and puzzled me.
And so he did.
The production is not a slab of agitprop in the current fashion.
There are no Trump masks or Trump impersonators or MAGA caps.
(Fish first conceived his version in pre-Trump 2007.)
Our history tells us that they wont vanish once Trump is gone.
A great America has always been a work-in-progress.
Which is not to saythatOklahoma!,its dark shadows notwithstanding, is innocent of whitewashing American history.
As lore has it, Oklahoma in Choctaw means red people.
There is an itinerant immigrant peddler, Ali Hakim, inOklahoma!,but not a single Indian.
Chunks of the original plays dialogue and stage directions survive in the at-once streamlined and expanded musical adaptation.
He was an avid participant in the counterculture of his time.
Originally titledAway We Go!,the show had had a famously bumpy tryout in New Haven and Boston.
His last credits included an unproduced television play and an unfinished novel.
Given Riggss own life story, how could he have written about anyone else?
The characterof Jud Fry is called Jeeter inLilacs.
Now dont you say nuthin agin him, says Laureys beloved Aunt Eller in Juds defense.
Hes the best hired hand I ever had.
But all anyone does is denigrate him.
Oklahomans have been lousy in every town where hes worked, he laments, making out they was better.
Treatin me like dirt.
Then she fires him without cause.
Hammerstein wrestled with the characters inclusion in the show.
Fishs reawakening of the character pivots on an iconoclastic casting choice, though not the one you might expect.
The text is silent on whether Juds death is accidental or Curly facilitates it.
The ensuing kangaroo court isnt played for the usual laughs.
Lets just bend it a little lands not as funny but sinister.
It doesnt matter if youve never heard of Lynn Riggs.
In the case of Oklahoma, the victimized populations include African-Americans as well as Native Americans.
The official death toll was 36, but a 2001 study corrected it to between 100 and 300.
The culprits were let off as Curly was, no doubt under some spurious rationalization of self-defense.
That conflagration was still within recent memory at the timeOklahoma!arrived on Broadway in 1943.
Or would have been had it not been purged from the record.
And I mean literally purged.
The dead were tossed into the Arkansas River and unmarked mass graves.
News accounts were cut out of the TulsaTribunebefore they were assembled into bound reference volumes.
The incident was not a part of the Oklahoma public schools curriculum until 2000, and only recentlyenteredAmerican-history textbooks.
Any physical remnants of that 1921 inferno had long since been bulldozed by the time I passed through.
But Rodgers and Hammersteins patriotism was not mindless jingoism, and their art was not propaganda.
