The Corn’s High in Gritty ‘Oklahoma!’

NEW YORK--Eight years ago, British director Nicholas Hytner radically reinvented “Carousel” on Broadway with modern insight and stunning visual magic.

Two years later, Christopher Renshaw--an English director living in Australia--brought a sumptuous “King and I” that had layers of bittersweet colonial resonance.

Now Trevor Nunn, outgoing director of London’s Royal National Theatre, arrives at the Gershwin Theatre with his comparably acclaimed and awarded “Oklahoma!” Like his colleagues, he is said to be revealing a Rodgers & Hammerstein classic through a dark new lens. In addition, he hired the tireless Susan Stroman--before “Contact” and “The Producers”--and asked her to toss aside the sacred Agnes de Mille choreography that made dance inseparable from story and song.

After several delays, that 1998 make-over finally opened Thursday night in a country with a sudden craving for comfort foods, greatest hits and tributes to our manifest destiny. The show--recast except for Josefina Gabrielle’s Laurey and Shuler Hensley’s majestically haunting Jud Fry--is big, lively, expensively put together, energetically reconfigured, ecstatically and acrobatically danced.

I want to love it. Instead, this “Oklahoma!” is just OK. There is too much mugging, a hard-sell jollity that feels especially pushy when exploring the darkest side of Hammerstein’s shaded but ultimately sunny book and Rodgers’ subtle but essentially sunny score. The 1943 kickoff to the golden age of the American musical still has those wonderful songs, tumbling one after another, as inextricable from our national chemistry as blood and marrow are from observers who know more of the words than perhaps they realized.

The eager actors keep punching up the sweet, cornball banter as if it were intended to be hilarious. After such a convincing attempted rape and the brutal murder of a monster we come to know more intimately than we know the heroes, the return to hokey-folky affability seems almost grotesque.

Of course, Nunn may be commenting on--even celebrating--the country’s resilient optimism in the face of ugly terrain. If these Americans were not generally played here as goofballs with guns, the interpretation might even be a compliment. Anthony Ward’s sets, despite the high-tech cinematic travelogue during the overture, emphasize the rough life on the open plains. Ward mostly dresses the characters in stock musical-comedy finery, but Aunt Eller’s house looks more like a white-trash shack than a farm. I know we’re meant to feel the dirt on the ground and the grit under the fingernails, but the other inconsistencies of tone tend to jerk us around with high concept.

Where DeMille brought in dancers for Laurey’s conflicted dream ballet, Stroman’s bright idea is to have the lovers themselves--Patrick Wilson’s amiable cowboy, Curly, and Gabrielle’s unusually feisty Laurey--do their own dancing. This new dream ballet begins as Laurey sniffs smelling salts and becomes increasingly hallucinatory with newly arranged music. As the dream changes to nightmare, it is as Jud (who only knows dance-hall girls), might imagine it--if, of course, Jud had seen “Cabaret” and “Chicago.”

Gabrielle sings with a thin, edgy voice but moves with the spiky, confident lyricism of a dancer, which she used to be. Stroman endearingly appreciates that Wilson’s not much of a dancer nor a Broadway baritone of the Alfred Drake school. But the actor combines a modern diffidence with sweet, full-throated ardor. Hugh Jackman, who created this Curly in London before going Hollywood, is said to have been dreamy and introverted. We can only imagine.

Dreamy and introverted are in shorter supply here than perky and raucous. Since this Laurey is as much tomboy as ingenue, the show’s libidinal “Cain’t Say No” creature, Jessica Boevers’ Ado Annie, is pushed into burlesque. Andrea Martin’s Aunt Eller is an unusually ditsy party animal. Aasif Mandvi brings some humanity to the exotic cliche of the Persian peddler. And Justin Bohon is a real find as Will Parker, who not only sings and dances, but can hold a woman by her armpits and jump rope with her body.

It is hard not to miss DeMille’s lean, character-driven aesthetic, but Stroman offers lots of space-eating, cannily transformed country dances with big wishbone jumps and high-energy variations on standard modern-ballet lifts. Finally, what we remember is the outcast Jud, transformed by Hensley from a mean joke to a big, sad, scary man who holds his beloved Laurey as Steinbeck’s Lenny loved his pet mouse to death. In contrast, the good guys seem like clowns.

*

“Oklahoma!,” Gershwin Theatre, 222 W. 51st St., New York. Tickets: (212) 307-4100 or (800) 755-4000.