A Bright Golden Haze

In the Royal National Theatre’s 1992 landmark production of “Carousel,” director Nicholas Hytner hungrily explored the darkest corners of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, and many theatergoers who had only seen the film version were surprised by how somber and elegant and spiritual the show had become. Still, people here continue to argue that it is not fitting for a subsidized British theater to produce a classic, mass-appeal American musical. And yet the National insists on doing so.

Last month, Trevor Nunn, the company’s newly appointed artistic director, opened a full-scale, athletic and loving rendition of “Oklahoma!” on the National’s largest stage, the Olivier. Once again, the National has approached Rodgers and Hammerstein with the same care and intellectual respect it would show to Ibsen. And once again, Rodgers and Hammerstein prove worthy.

Oscar Hammerstein II is often underrated because of his simplicity. “Oh, what a beautiful morning/Oh, what a beautiful day” is the lyric that starts the show, soaring through the theater on the wing of a perfectly shaped melody (and on Hugh Jackman’s lovely tenor). Hammerstein’s writing has all of the elegant directness of that lyric--the elemental, inevitable quality of a Shaker chair. Adapting the Lynn Riggs play “Green Grow the Lilacs,” he fashioned a musical about a territory on the verge of statehood. Save one, his characters are hardy and thoroughly likable, particularly the cowboy Curly (a thoroughly winning Jackman) and his sometimes ornery girl, Laurey (the graceful Josefina Gabrielle). Their courtship is haunted by the farmhand Jud (Shuler Hensley), a creepy pariah who becomes the violent emblem of the disenfranchised.

Nunn begins the show with a kind of reverent hush, ringing a false alarm that the evening will be stiff and formal. As the overture starts, Nunn lets the audience glimpse a large orchestra at the back of the deep, circular stage. Scrims lower and rise to give us new images: a forlorn, angular prairie house in the middle ground, then, in the foreground, a high field of corn.

Next, the show’s title is projected on a blank curtain, as if it were the frontispiece of an expensive, shrink-wrapped book, with the word “Oklahoma!” written as if with a cowboy’s rope. But Nunn is only clearing his throat; he gets the fusty, presentational style out of his system and does not look back.

He is helped immeasurably by Susan Stroman’s choreography. She keeps her dances clean and energetic. Cowboys pair off with women in calf-length skirts that swirl perfectly as they leap, recalling the work of the original choreographer, Agnes de Mille. As much as any other element in the show, these dances define the pre-neurotic and uninhibited way these characters deal with their emotions. The charming line dances and outbreaks of do-si-do bespeak a pioneer community that is not entirely innocent. One barn dance finds Jud trying to cut in and being continually ignored by the backsides of the swirling dancers. Jud and his resentment don’t go away, and he gives “Oklahoma!” weight and makes it something more than just a celebration of the plucky, democratic American pioneer spirit.

In Nunn’s production, Jud--played by the American Hensley--is the show’s central performance. Living in a squalid smokehouse, with nudie pictures for decoration, Hensley’s Jud is a swampy thing full of fetid anger that is stronger even than his desire for love.

In the black comedy number “Pore Jud Is Daid,” Curly visits the smokehouse and genially asks Jud to imagine his own funeral. Curly’s kidding, but he’s not. As he sings to Jud, Hensley’s eyes fill with wonder at the long-forgotten possibility that there could be a scenario in which he is not universally despised. But then he remembers that some things cannot be fixed.

As the comic couple Will Parker and Ado Annie, Jimmy Johnston and Vicki Simon are fresh; they do especially well with “All Er Nothin’,” their hilarious fidelity debate. Maureen Lipman is excellent as Laurey’s wise Aunt Eller, who says, “You gotta be hardy,” and knows just exactly how hard that is. Peter Polycarpou gives an exquisitely well-shaded comic performance as Ali Hakim, the womanizing, traveling “Persian” peddler who sounds suspiciously like he’s from the Bronx.

Originally, De Mille brought in dancers to represent the main characters in Laurey’s “Dream Sequence” that ends Act 1. Here, the leads dance their own roles, and Gabrielle delivers her most eloquent work in the long narrative dance that depicts Laurey’s dream of happy marriage to Curly, a dream interrupted by a terrifying boogeyman in the shape of Jud and the women from his nudie pictures, who force Laurey to join a racy chorus line.

Set designer Anthony Ward employs stark lines for his windmill and farmhouse. In the background, the orange arc of a prairie and looming blue sky imitate the aching emptiness of regional prairie paintings. Though one might argue with some of Ward’s flat, ugly colors, his lines are exactly right. They suggest we view this show as a valuable document, one that can tell us something we should listen to about our origins. Set in the beginning of the century, written in the middle of it, now, at century’s end, a British production reminds us that “Oklahoma!” is an American treasure, both primitive and profound.

* Royal National Theatre, South Bank, London, 011 441 71 452-3000.