Oklahoma! – Grange Park Opera

Picture: Robert Workman

Oklahoma! continues at The Theatre in the Woods, West Horsley Place, Surrey until 7 July.

Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩

Oklahoma!, granny’s favourite, is a safe choice for Grange Park Opera’s first musical in their wondrous new theatre in the Surrey woods, built by themselves with the help of generous donations after the fallout with the landlord at their old HQ in Hampshire.

At their former base they had done Fiddler on the Roof (with Bryn Terfel) and Oliver! (another show that carries the exclamation mark!) and eight performances of Oklahoma! spread over a month tees off their summer festival completed by some heavier stuff, Un Ballo in Maschera, Pushkin and Roméo et Juliette.

They do things differently at GPO. The curtain goes up at six o’clock, then after Act I comes a 100-minute interval so that the mostly dinner-jacketed audience can roll out their picnics (real plates, not paper ones) in the beautiful grounds and hammer their way through the bubbly.

That puts them in a generous mood for Act II of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s first collaboration 75 years ago, in 1943. With best seats costing £180 and the souvenir brochure £25 it is not a cheap night out.

The lavish brochure doubles as a programme for all four productions but, among all the worthy features (if you’re an Oklahoma! fan, do you really want to read about Un Ballo in Maschera?), one basic requirement for any musical is missing: a song list and who sings them.

There are a lot of positives for this production: spectacular dancing (great choreography by Andrew Wright), timeless songs like ‘Oh, What A Beautiful Mornin’, ‘People Will Say We’re In Love’, ‘Many a New Day’, ‘Out Of My Dreams’, ‘The Surrey With the Fringe On Top’, and of course the title song, and the BBC Concert Orchestra under the baton of Richard Balcombe deals lovingly with the lustrous score.

The cast is right on the money too with Katie Hall’s thrilling soprano as winsome Laurey a standout. Romantic lead Dex Lee makes a fine cowboy as Curly and the pair make a handsome team, their duet ‘People Will Say We’re in Love’ delighting the audience.

Natasha Cottriall as the feisty Ado Annie is a lively presence and imbues ‘I Cain’t Say No’ with plenty of humour, Claire Moore as bossy Aunt Eller makes a real character of the part although not all her words with a Midwest twang are clear, and Lauren Hood’s bizarre cackle after every sentence as Gertie Cummings, a farm girl keen on Curly, gets plenty of laughs.

The morose psychopath Jud gives Phillip Rhodes the darkest song of the piece ‘Lonely Room’ to get his teeth into, Steven Serlin as the fake Persian pedlar Ali Hakim who takes a shine to Ado Annie has some funny moments, and Louis Gaunt dances up a storm as Will Parker who finally gets his girl

It’s not all light and lovely as there’s a troubling dream sequence and a fight that ends in death (conveniently forgotten in the festivities at the Curly/Laurey wedding which seems a bit strange).

And the auction scene with a pretty girl the prize for the highest bidder probably wouldn’t be written in today’s climate.

Despite its fame, Oklahoma! doesn’t really float my boat. It’s a show of its time and now seems more like a treasured antique.

Act I lasts almost an hour and three-quarters which is far too long – director Jo Davies could push it along a bit – and I found it hard to identify with the characters or care about them. Oh, what a beautiful morning for sure but only a so-so evening.

Jeremy Chapman