Return to the Tangleweed home page
1/30/2007

Oklahoma!

By Billy Oh. Filed under: TweedBlog.

I’ve been spending most of my time these days in rehearsal for Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, which I’ll be performing in with American Theater Company. This production takes a departure from the traditional Broadway style musical and puts everything in an intimate setting faithful to the period of the story, 1900’s frontier America. All the music is stripped to a four piece string band in which I play fiddle and mandolin.

The show runs from Jan. 31 through Mar. 4. It was named one of the top ten shows to see this year by the Chicago Tribune.

2 Comments »

  1. Kip, that ends up sounding a lot like Green Grow the Lilacs the original play by Lynn Riggs (an Oklahoman, and enrolled member of the Cherokee nation) on which Oklahoma! was based - from which, in fact, Oklahoma! took much of its dialogue. Befitting its time and place (Oklahoma in the Depression), Riggs 1931 play is quite a bit darker (especially in the wedding night section, from which Oklahoma! significantly departs) and the music in it is used diagetically. That is to say, when characters sing and dance, they do so with onstage instrumentation (i.e. Curly plays the guitar) and in situations in which the characters might actually sing (dances, doing housework, etc.). Accordingly, the music is entirely from “found” sources: cowboy, string band, and other already exisitng “folk” songs: “Git Along Little Dogies,” “I Ride an Old Paint,” “Green Grow the Lilacs,” “The Miner Boy,” “Sam Hall (Damn Yer Eyes),” “The Little Brass Wagon [which is “The Drunken Sailor”],” “Custer’s Last Charge [which, though melodies aren’t given, seems to basically follow “The Lawson Family Murder,” “When I Was Young and Single,” and “Skip to My Lou.” Somewhere, I have photos of my students in Turkey dressed up and acting out scenes from Green Grow the Lilacs, which they did as part of the American Theater class I taught at Bilkent.

    Comment by Ryan Jerving — 1/30/2007 @ 9:53 am

  2. All apologies for incorrectly addressing that last comment - said comment should have been directed toward Billy, not Kip. Sorry!

    Comment by Ryan Jerving — 1/30/2007 @ 10:28 am

Leave a comment

Your email address is never published or displayed. Basic HTML allowed. Fields marked * are required.

*

*