Pretty like the Girl: Gender, Race and Oklahoma!

Abstract

Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! (1943), conceived in collaboration with choreographer Agnes de Mille and others, has achieved an unparalleled status in musical theater history and continues to remain popular through amateur and professional revivals. My article first explores the work's genesis in Lynn Riggs' play about the Oklahoma Territory of his early childhood and Hammerstein's subsequent revisions to make the work conform to the conventions of a nostalgic romance plot. Drawing on primary sources, I examine in detail the musical, textual and choreographic characterization of gender, ethnicity and class within this romance plot and demonstrate that Oklahoma! capitalized on gendered and racialized dialects, musical practices and specific kinds of movement that marked the characters and their particular roles. Riggs' turn-of-the-twentieth-century rural setting, Rodgers' choice to limit syncopation, long a hallmark of the musical theatre repertory and a marker of urban musical ‘blackness’, and de Mille's use of white folk dance and balletic movement vocabularies, served to re-center domesticated white, gendered bodies on the American musical stage. While Ado Annie and Laurey set up the well-worn, if comic, virgin/whore dichotomy that circumscribes appropriate modes of gender and class-based femininity, Curly's character presented a compelling image of white masculine self-sufficiency that proved especially salient within the context of World War II and continues to prove so.

Notes

1. Lynn Riggs, Green Grow the Lilacs (New York: Samuel French, 1931), pp. vii–viii.

2. Oscar Hammerstein II, ‘In Re “Oklahoma!”’, New York Times, 23 May 1943, section X, pp. 1–2; Hammerstein II, Lyrics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1949), pp. 17–19; Agnes de Mille, America Dances (New York: MacMillan, 1980), pp. 188–89, and Theresa Helburn, A Wayward Quest: The Autobiography of Theresa Helburn (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1960), p. 282.

3. Tim Carter in his chapter ‘Reading Oklahoma’, from Oklahoma!: The Making of an American Musical (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 173–211, provides a good overview of various interpretations of national identity and ethnicity. See also Raymond Knapp, The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Richard M. Goldstein, ‘“I Enjoy Being a Girl'': Women in the Plays of Rodgers and Hammerstein’, Popular Music and Society, 13 (Spring 1989), 1–8; Philip D. Beidler, ‘South Pacific and American Remembering’, Journal of American Studies, 27 (1993), 207–22; Bruce A. McConachie, ‘The “Oriental” Musicals of Rodgers and Hammerstein and the U. S. War in Southeast Asia’, Theatre Journal, 46 (1994), 385–98; Paul Filmer, Val Rimmer and Dave Walsh, ‘Oklahoma!: Ideology and Politics in the Vernacular Tradition of the American Musical’, Popular Music, 18 (1999), 381–95; Bruce Kirle, ‘Reconciliation, Resolution, and the Political Role of Oklahoma! in American Consciousness', Theatre Journal, 55 (May 2003), 251–74; and Albert Borowitz, ‘“Pore Jud is Daid”: Violence and Lawlessness in the Plays of Lynn Riggs', Legal Studies Forum, 27 (2003), 157–84.

4. Riggs, Green Grow the Lilacs, p. 146.

5. Ibid., p. 19.

6. Ibid., p. vii.

7. Oscar Hammerstein II quoted in ‘Story of Oklahoma!’ in Oklahoma! program, date unknown, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library, Lincoln Center, mwez n.c. 7446.

8. Riggs, Green Grow the Lilacs, p. 44.

9. Hammerstein, ‘In Re “Oklahoma!”’. p. 2.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid.

12. Erin Addison, ‘Saving Other Women from Other Men: Disney's Aladdin’, Camera Obscura, 31 (1993), 5–25 (p. 8).

13. See Jane Tompkins, West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

14. Christian Mendenhall, ‘American Musical Comedy as a Liminal Ritual of Woman as Homemaker’, Journal of American Culture, 13 (Winter 1990), 57–69 (p. 66).

15. Riggs, Green Grow the Lilacs, p. 47; Andrea Most explores the Yiddish-ness of Ali Hakim as part of her larger study of Jewish assimilation through musicals in Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004).

16. Hammerstein, ‘In Re “Oklahoma!”’, p. 1.

17. Richard Rodgers, ‘Preface’, in Oscar Hammerstein II, Lyrics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1949), p. xv.

18. Richard Rodgers, Musical Stages: An Autobiography (New York: Random House, 1975), pp. 219–20.

19. Naomi Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (New York: Methuen, 1987).

20. Riggs, Green Grow the Lilacs, pp. 9–10.

21. ‘Green Grow the Lilacs' exists in multiple versions that share the triple meter and melodic contours. I consulted those in The American Heritage Songbook (New York: American Heritage Publishing Co., 1969) and Albert E. Brumley, Songs of the Pioneers No. 2 (Powell, Missouri: Albert E. Brumley, 1973).

22. This and subsequent references to Bennett's arrangements refer to the musical scores located in the Richard Rodgers Collection at the Library of Congress, Music 3608, item 2.

23. Hammerstein, Lyrics, p. 8.

24. Joseph P. Swain, The Broadway Musical (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 75. Swain does not indicate whether this label is his own or not. He also cites Hart, Cole Porter and Stephen Sondheim as particularly adept at this ‘feminizing’ technique. Given the sexualities of the lyricists involved, Swain's delineation of a kind of lyrical effeminacy deserves more scrutiny than I can provide here.

25. Hammerstein, Lyrics, pp. 22–23.

26. Richard Rodgers, Oklahoma! Vocal Score (New York: Williamson Music Co., 1943), pp. 65–66.

27. Lisa Jo Sagolla, The Girl Who Fell Down: A Biography of Joan McCracken (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003), pp. 1–3, 269. Sagolla's description of the choreography draws from de Mille's notes, videos of recreations under de Mille's direction and from interviews with de Mille and other dancers in the original production. Photographs in the Billy Rose Theatre Collection, Oklahoma, Photo File B, also provide evidence of the movement.

28. Kathryn Kalinak notes that by the 1930s Hollywood film scores similarly drew on dotted rhythms and syncopation as well as other timbral associations from jazz, blues and ragtime as a way to mark female sexuality as indecent or promiscuous. Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), p. 120.

29. Carter, Oklahoma!, p. 92.

30. The New Yorker, 10 April 1943, p. 34.

31. Rodgers, Musical Stages, p. 222.

32. Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, Oklahoma!: A Musical Play (New York: Random House, 1943), p. 19.

33. Text contained in The Library of Congress, Richard Rodgers Collection, Box 12, folder 15.

34. Rodgers and Hammerstein, Oklahoma!, p. 19.

35. Marking the secondary couple's class status through embodied social dance was not new to Oklahoma! The Desert Song (1927) which Hammerstein wrote with Otto Harbach, Frank Mandel and composer Sigmund Romberg, for example, similarly uses the waltz to set off the main upper-class lovers from the comic secondary duo, whose music is distinguished by foxtrot and tango rhythms.

36. The description of the dance appears in the script contained in The Library of Congress, Richard Rodgers Collection, Box 12, folder 15.

37. An elaborate production number, ‘Boys and Girls Like You and Me’, which featured an extended kiss between Laurey and Curly was dropped during tryouts. Carter, Oklahoma!, p. 92 and Joan Roberts, Never Alone (New York: McMullen Books, 1954), p. 193.

38. Rodgers and Hammerstein, Oklahoma!, p. 146.

39. Agnes de Mille, Dance to the Piper (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1951), p. 210. The Graham-Copland Appalachian Spring provides yet another early 1940s view of the rural, pioneer romance plot.

40. De Mille, America Dances, pp. 188–89.

41. Ibid., p. 188.

42. Rodgers and Hammerstein, Oklahoma!, p. 80.

45. Ibid.

43. Ibid., p. 81.

44. Ibid., p. 82.

46. De Mille's choreographic description appears in Irving Deakin, At the Ballet: A Guide to Enjoyment (Toronto: Thomas Nelson, 1956), pp. 131–34.

47. The inability to make up her mind is a trait Laurey shared with Weill's heroine in Lady in the Dark who also required a Freudian dream scene that likewise frightens her back into domestic heterosexuality.

48. Gilbert Seldes, The 7 Lively Arts (New York: Sagamore Press, 1957), p. 240.

49. Marshall and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance (New York: MacMillan, 1966), p. 168.

50. Ibid., p. 159.

51. A 22 May 1943 Theatre Guild release found in The Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library, Lincoln Center, mwez n.c. 25,609 1943c.

52. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988).

53. Oklahoma! clipping file, The Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library, Lincoln Center, mwez. n.c. 25,609.

54. Robert Garland, ‘Oklahoma!: It's Been Five Years’, Editorial Review, 28 March 1948, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library, Lincoln Center, clipping file mwez n.c. 10,708a.

55. Roberts, Never Alone, p. 183.

56. Steven M. Gelder, ‘Do-It-Yourself: Construction, Repairing and Maintaining Domestic Masculinity’, American Quarterly, 49 (1997), 66–112.

57. Ibid., pp. 68, 82.

58. I agree with Nancy Franklin in her assessment of The Sound of Music and would extend it to many other musicals and operas. ‘On a deep, cellular level, I loathe most of the lyrics and on an equally primitive level I find myself helplessly moved by some of the melodies'. Nancy Franklin, ‘The Gathering Storm’, The New Yorker, 6 April 1998, p. 106.

59. For interpretations of recent musicals and especially the theme of exotic otherness see Roberta Trites, ‘Disney's Sub/Version of Andersen's “The Little Mermaid”’, Journal of Popular Film & Television, 18 (Winter 1991), 145–52; Erin Addison ‘Saving Other Women from Other Men: Disney's Aladdin’; Kathi Maio, ‘Pocahontas: Disney Does It (To US) Again’, Sojourner: The Women's Forum (August 1995), 27–29; Henry A. Giroux, ‘Politics and Innocence in the Wonderful World of Disney’, in Disturbing Pleasures: Learning Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 25–45; and Kiyomi Kutsuzawa, ‘Disney's Pocahontas: Reproduction of Gender, Orientalism, and the Strategic Construction in the Disney Empire’, Atlantis, 2 (2004), 43–52.

60. George Ferencz, author of the biography of Robert Russell Bennett, noted that his contacts at the Rodgers and Hammerstein Foundation claimed that Oklahoma! consistently represented half of their rental business. (Email to the author, 9 November 1995.) In a September 2007 phone call a representative of the Foundation informed me that this musical received roughly 500 bookings per year.

61. A first draft of this article benefited from a careful reading by Eleonora Beck, and I also wish to thank the editors of this special issue, and especially their two anonymous reviewers, for the opportunity to revise my work here.