There’s a bright golden haze on the medder—and on just about everything else in Trevor Nunn’s revival of Oklahoma!—but it’s the hard, cold glint of lucre, not the burnished glow of harvest and renewal. This long-awaited production, which was hailed, when it opened four years ago at London’s Royal National Theatre, as a wholesale rethinking of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s first-ever collaboration, arrives at the Gershwin looking strangely like a revival you might have expected to see at the Paper Mill Playhouse ten or fifteen years ago.
It’s anxious to be liked but charmless, imitative rather than innovative or inventive, and very Continue reading