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From:
Steve Schwartz <[log in to unmask]>
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Moderated Classical Music List <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Mon, 1 Oct 2007 16:49:26 -0700
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Oklahoma!:
The Making of an American Musical

Tim Carter.
New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 2007. 327 pp.
ISBN: 978-0-300-10619-0

Summary for the Busy Executive: Okay.

The bloom on the rose of the musical Oklahoma!  has faded a bit since
its Forties premiere.  It ran - unusual for the time - four years to
generally boffo business, won a special Pulitzer Prize, and provoked
a rash of "think" pieces not only from theater critics, but from
classical-music counterparts.  Even the high-theater critic and theorist
Eric Bentley singled it out, though not favorably.  In its wake, it gave
rise to all sorts of revisionist history about the American musical
theater: that it was the first "play with music," that it was the first
integrated musical show, that it was the first to incorporate ballet,
and so on.  All of these propositions are easily disproved.

Indeed, Oklahoma!  pushed the innovation of the musical far less strongly
than Kern's Princess shows, Berlin's Music Box shows, Show Boat, Of Thee
I Sing, The Cradle Will Rock, Johnny Johnson, As Thousands Cheer, Lady
in the Dark, Pal Joey, and Knickerbocker Holiday, to name just some of
its distinguished predecessors.  As far as its music goes, with the
exception of "Out of My Dreams" and "Lonely Room" (a song very few people
have heard of, let alone heard), it really doesn't come up to the best
of Rodgers and Hart or, for that matter, of Rodgers and Hammerstein
themselves.  Alec Wilder, in his cranky classic on the American popular
song, has no kind words for it whatsoever.  Nevertheless, the show has
achieved the status of an icon.

It almost never happened at all.  From the beginning, the production
suffered a plague of money shortages.  It threatened to sink its producers,
the Theater Guild (who had also presented Gershwin's masterful Porgy and
Bess).  The accounting leant toward the "creative." If Oklahoma!  hadn't
been a hit, some very prominent people might have wound up in jail.

Tim Carter untangles fact from myth, account from conflicting account.
The creative team tended to emphasize their acumen and prescience -
particularly director Rouben Mamoulian and choreographer Agnes De Mille
- with the show's mounting success.  The book's strength is Carter's
research.  If you want to know production costs or weekly expenses, you
can find much of it here.  Carter does less well on aesthetic analysis,
and one looks in vain for a controlling thesis for the book.  Furthermore,
Carter writes in a style one could charitably describe as "academic,"
although many in the academy write better than this.  He is particularly
drawn to the word "diegetic," and at times he doesn't seem to know what
the word means ("relating to narrative"), as in:

   Similarly, in musicals (and for that matter, in opera) music
   always draws attention to itself as music even when it pretends
   to be emotional articulation; thus it will be diegetic to the
   genre even if it is not diegetic within the drama in terms of
   verisimilitude.

Surely at least one of those *diegetics* is wrong.  You may catch yourself
nodding off in the middle of a paragraph.  Nevertheless, Carter comes
up with interesting tidbits.  My favorite concerns the near-decade it
took for Oklahoma to adopt the eponymous song as its official state
anthem.  At least one Western Solon objected to the line "Every night
my honey lamb and I" as "indecorous."

As usual with the current crop of books from academic presses, annoying
little errors pepper the text.  The soprano is Eleanor Steber, not
Sterber, and Harold, not Howard, Arlen wrote Bloomer Girl.  And this
is Yale, for heaven's sake.

Steve Schwartz

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