I was at lunch the other day with a friend who was telling me about her great love for Oklahoma! and just how much this show has impacted musical theatre.
I have to admit that while I have been working on this show for the past 3 months and knew that the show really was a turning point in musical theatre, it had never really dawned on me just how important this show actually is. I mean, if it weren't for Oklahoma! we might still be watching vaudeville type shows where the whole point is to show off one specific person's talent. Without Oklahoma!we might not have had the shows that are incredibly popular today. Songs would be supporting the actor, instead of the story, which would not have been one cohesive whole.
Thinking about this later, I realized just how indebted the musical theatre community is to R&H. That is not to say that anything before them wasn't important, because it's all important, but if it weren't for R&H, everything that has been created since would not have had such a strong base to work off of. Without Oklahoma!, there might not have been a Wicked, a Rent, or Into the Woods. Everything that we are taught in musical theatre classes is based off of what R&H have done.
The major problem with anything that R&H is that it's hard to find a new take on their shows. Why? Maybe because we've given them the "happy" label and it's hard to break out of that. But if one were to really dig into their plays, it's easy to see that their body of work is quite dark and modern. Jud is trying to kill Curly to get Laurey. Laurey is becoming a woman, and that is a scary enough situation for any young female adult. Curly is willing to give up everything he loves in order to get the girl of his dreams.
We may take R&H for granted now because we have had so many musicals since that have blown all of us out of the water. But, like everything else, we can't forget our roots and for musical theatre, whether we like R&H or not, can't forget where those amazing musicals have come from.
