Oklahoma! review: You certainly won’t forget it in a hurry

I fear for anyone who might see there’s a new production of Oklahoma! on in the West End and book for it, expecting a jolly night out.

For US director Daniel Fish’s radical spin on the Rodgers And Hammerstein musical, which has transferred to the Wyndham’s Theatre after being the hottest of tickets at the Young Vic last year, is the opposite of easy entertainment.

From the moment that typically sunny anthem Oh, What A Beautiful Mornin’ is turned into something altogether more downbeat and dirge-like, it’s clear we’re not in the traditional Oklahoma! anymore: instead of cornfields and ‘yee-haws’, we get a stripped-back, gun-lined set, and a Midwest American milieu governed by brooding eroticism and an ever-looming threat of violence.

Turning cowboy Curly, the musical’s notional romantic hero into a hard-edged anti-hero, Arthur Darvill is superb, as is the whole ensemble, among them Liza Sadovy’s atypically tough Aunt Eller and Patrick Vaill’s ethereally unsettling Jud Fry.

Best of all, though, is Georgina Onuorah, who has a ball and provides much-needed light relief as man-juggling bon vivant Ado Annie: her rendition of I Cain’t Say No is a delightfully lascivious showstopper.

It has to be said that this production loses a little from being in a proscenium arch theatre now, where at the Young Vic the staging was in-the-round, and so that much more immersive.

But it’s still incredibly powerful, with a finale that ventures into the emotionally brutal realm of Greek tragedy and leaves its characters spattered in blood. You certainly won’t forget it in a hurry.

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