The National Tour of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! arrived at the Kennedy Center's Eisenhower Theatre this week for a mercifully brief engagement, and shortly before Thursday's performance began, the preshow announcement encouraged audience members to pull out their phones, take a selfie, add a 50th anniversary hashtag, and then silence them. Left unmentioned was that the ensuing three hours would include bizarre theatre, gunshots ringing out in a pitch black theatre, and audience members being showered with kernels of corn and carbonated beverages.
Warning: this is not your traditional version of OKLAHOMA!, and good riddance. Without changing a word of the book or lyrics, director Daniel Fish has created a revival of the 1943 musical that highlights different aspects of the material simply by changing the tone in which scenes are presented. The story has always been one of a community banding together against an outside, but that aspect of the show is usually buried in favor of the sunnier, romantic elements of the plot. Not so this time. While the show loses some of its oomph by no longer being presented in the round, as it was during its run on Broadway at the Circle in the Square Theatre, there is still plenty to like even when presented in a traditional space like the Providence Performing Arts Center’s.