Oklahoma - (2)

Oklahoma the state

Oh What A Beautiful Morning!

What a fantastic song to start a show.....an empty stage and a lone voice. 

It's also a favourite for singing in the car as I set out in the morning, cheers me up for the whole day.

The music from Oklahoma! stays with you long after you leave the theatre, there are so many clever lyrics and catchy tunes that it almost impossible to pick out a single one. “The Surrey with a Fringe on top”, “Many a New Day” “I Cain't Say No” “Kansas City” and Oklahoma! Itself . I will end up listing them all if I carry on.

It is the show that for my society brought the most people ever to audition for roles, with as many going for Ado Annie as for Laurey, The audition committee had a whole day of auditions to judge for these two parts alone.

The setting is 1906, the year before Oklahoma became a State of the USA, and costumes are traditionally gingham dresses and checked cowboy shirts, which makes life a little easier for the wardrobe department, although there are many possible variations on this theme.

Oliver! - (2)

Our first introduction to the characters of this show is to that of Mr Bumble the beadle and Widow Corney, the workhouse mistress. Oliver is introduced through their perspective when he stands out from the crowd of boys by asking for more food. The wordy and fast “Oliver!” spells out the conditions under which the boys live, and the joy with which the power over them is wielded. Mr Bumble is definitely what today would be known as a “Jobsworth”, and Widow Corney is out for all she can get...including Mr Bumble.
Oliver isn't really established as a character until he has been introduced to the Sowerberrys, whose grim humour and cynicism is portrayed in “That's Your Funeral”.
Only once he is left alone in the funeral parlour does he start to show who he is with the solo song “Where is Love” and our sympathies are with him when he meets and is bullied by Noah Claypole. No wonder he cracks and runs away to seek his fortune in the big city of London. The place where runaways still believe their fortunes are waiting to be made, even if the streets are not exactly paved with gold.

The Artful Dodger and Fagin show us their fun side and we, like Oliver, are deceived into thinking these two are nice generous characters, who only want to help a poor little lost boy....the dark underbelly of the story is only hinted at briefly. We want to believe that Oliver is rescued from the workhouse, and the cruelty of the slavery there and at the funeral parlour, is a worse fate than that of Fagin's gang. So for the audience this is a fun, amusing and optimistic view of Dickens story.  Bill Sykes is the villain, the out-and-out baddie that heroic stories require, but Dodger and Fagin are ambivalent opportunists, rascals rather than mean and nasty criminals, caught up in the trap that poverty has set for them.

Bill Sykes doesn't appear in the stage musical until Act  2  when we are introduced to him with the spine-chilling song “ My Name” which does not feature in the film version. For me this song epitomised the character; as a chorus member in the pub singing along with gusto to “Oom-Pah-Pah” with Nancy, the change in atmosphere wrought by the music and Bill's appearance at the door to the pub always managed to make me shiver, regardless of the fact that the actor playing Bill Sykes was a friend off stage. This alone is enough to make us cheer his demise at the end of Act 2.

For a story about criminal gangs, poverty and brutality, this has become an extremely popular uplifting musical, enjoyed by many audiences, both young and old. When the innocent survive and the evil-doers get their just desserts, the fairytale of “happy ever after” is allowed to continue.