Ok! the Story of Oklahoma!: A Celebration of America's Most Loved Musical

by Max Wilk

Book Overview

OK THE STORY OF OKLAHOMA A CELEBRATION OF AMERICA'S MOST BELOVED MUSICAL.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1557835551
• ISBN13: 9781557835550
• Release Date: March 2002
• Publisher: Applause Books
• Length: 302 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 7.1" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Oklahoma, Okay

This is the kind of book that used to excite me, books all about the Broadway musical. Has there ever been a musical with as much to offer as OKLAHOMA? It wasn't always a surefire hit, for before it began, people thought, oh well, this is a pretty slow show, no girls, no big numbers, and livestock on the stage. The powerful imagination of Oscar Hammerstein II caught that cornsilk and lit it on fire with the poetry of his lyrics. Who can ever forget "All the cattle are standing like statues." Mr Max Wilk evidently knows his OKLAHOMA and he has had great luck tracking down OKLAHOMA memorabilia. There are ticket stubs, photos of people watching the show, and the memories of those who first went to Broadway's "St James Theater" in March 1943 and made theatrical history. Richard Rodgers had been a topnotch Broadway composer for twenty years or more before OKLAHOMA but for one reason or another his music never really got under the skin of the mass US public. He had been partnered with the divinely talented Lorenz Hart for most of that time, and perhaps Hart had been caviare to the general? At any rate it took Oscar Hammerstein to begin Rodgers' incredible parade of shows with a heart. Rodgers wanted Charlotte Greenwood to play Aunt Eller but she was so busy she didn't get to play the part until the movie version many years later. (And she was great at it, still doing her trademark kicks with her elastic legs.) American soldiers in New York made the show a hit. Those hard men would sit in the back rows of the St James and weep like babies for love of the great land. In London, too, when OKLAHOMA travelled there, American soldiers sold out house after house, for when you're an American GI overseas there's nothing like a heaping dose of "We know we belong to the land" and the attending flagwaving. Wilk has it all on the ball, including the circumstances that led to the hiring of Agnes de Mille, top choreographer, to do the dances and ballets for this groundbreaking show. She was a strange creature, half magnet, half steel, but she brought something original to the Broadway stage, and her best dances have a unique poetry distilled out of a particular time and space. The movie version of OKLAHOMA preserves their flavor well.

A PRAIRIE WILDFIRE

Now that it seems certain that the acclaimed British revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein's OKLAHOMA! is headed to Broadway, perhaps the publishers of this invaluable book will re-release it? Max Wilk has assembled facts, memorabilia (including original ads, costume designs, etc.) cast photographs, interviews with the authors...in fact, everything that has anything to do with this musical (including short, contemporary comments by no less than director/producer, Harold Prince and composer/lyricist, Stephen Sondheim) which became a theatrical, historical phenomenon.Wilk has an easy, very readable style and the story of how this show came to be and how, in fact, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein ever came to work together (this WAS, remember, their very first collaboration), how the musical was cast, rehearsed, directed, choreographed, had its title changed from "Away We Go!", how theatre-goers begged and bartered for impossible-to-purchase tickets, and how this truly inspired musical "took off like a prairie wildfire" is exciting and a real page-turner.If you have any interest in live theatre, in musicals, in America during WW2, I urge you to, somehow, find this fascinating and handsome book.