Oklahoma! Reviews

James d from Manhattan, New York

EXCELLENT

I saw the show on Broadway and it was really good. It might be a little dark for some people, but it was fine for me. The “diversity” (woke by a reviewer) did not detract from the entertainment in any way. My daughter wants to see it (but couldn’t because she had class project due that week) so now I’m going to have to take her to a tour date. I will be curious how it plays outside New York? If it’s anything like the Broadway show, I’ll be fine seeing it a second time, which speaks for itself.

Ashish Thomas from Los Angeles, California

A "WOKE" REINTERPRETATION OF A CLASSIC MUSICAL

The Wall Street Journal's theater critic Terry Teachout had a scathing review of this "woke re-interpretation" of such a classic musical. I think it's worth quoting him: Not only do Curly and Laurie have no romantic chemistry ... but the show now ends not with an explosion of joy but in a pool of spilled blood. The rest of the staging is static, the casting is maximally nontraditional, and the book has been politically corrected (Ali Hakim, the Persian peddler, is deracinated). The men are thick-headed, loutish clods save for Jud, the psychopathic farmhand. Indeed, Jud is the only one who is portrayed as sympathetic, which tells you all you need to know about this “Oklahoma!” As for the “dream ballet,” newly choreographed by John Heginbotham, it’s a medley of modern-dance clichés so moldy that I briefly wondered whether it might possibly have been meant as a parody.

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