“If you think you’ve seen ‘Oklahoma!’, you really haven’t, ” proudly declares Light Opera Works’ general manager and co-founder Bridget McDonough. “Unless, that is, you’ve seen it with the full Robert Russell Bennett orchestrations. When we hear these Rogers and Hammerstein pieces that we think we know, uncut and with their original orchestrations, they are a revelation.”
Robert Russell Bennett was the master orchestrator and “go-to” guy for all of the great composers of Broadway’s golden age whose work is so rarely heard that it has been virtually forgotten today. “The work that he did really adds to the storytelling and really takes the drama to new heights of intimacy and emotion that you just don’t get if you’re seeing the show in summer stock, a high school, a community theater or some other way where the piece has been cut and you’re not having the full experience,” McDonough assesses. “Nowadays, even Broadway revivals do not give you the full orchestrations—it’s not financially possible anymore. So it’s really up to the non-for-profit music theaters like Light Opera Works to keep these American treasures alive as they were meant to be seen. These were complete works that were the product of several art forms combined together and if you take out any of those elements, you’re not seeing them as the true and complete masterpieces that they are.”
What particularly bothers McDonough is the move to deconstruct the American musical. “That can have validity as long as there is some respect for the form,” he says, “but some of these decontructions that we’ve seen in Chicago are done by people who do not understand, appreciate nor even like musical theater. There is a difference between a play and a musical. There’s ‘The Matchmaker’ and there’s ‘Hello, Dolly!’ There’s ‘Pygmalion’ and there’s ‘My Fair Lady.’ And in this case, there’s ‘Green Grow the Lilacs’ and there’s ‘Oklahoma!’ Do the play if you don’t like musicals. As one of my colleagues used to say, ‘They turn their nose up at our repertoire, until they have to sell tickets.’ This is a very complicated form. There certainly is a place for scaled-down productions, but you see the Real McCoy at Light Opera Works: a big show, with a full chorus, the full twenty-minute ballet sequence with all of the dance breaks, the full overture, the repeats, all of the fights, the cut songs that more fully explain the characters and the drama. If you really want to know this show, you have to come to us.” (Dennis Polkow)
“Oklahoma!” runs through December 31 at Northwestern University’s Cahn Auditorium, 600 Emerson, Evanston, (847)869-6300.
