Oregon Shakespeare Festival's Queer "Oklahoma!"

Review by Sonja Kuftinec, 2018
Oklahoma at Oregon Shakespeare Festival
“You're doin' fine, Oklahoma!” The Ensemble, including Jordan Barbour as Will Parker and Jonathan Luke Stevens as Ado Andy, sings of their home in the Oklahoma territory, which they expect will soon become a state. Photo by Jenny Graham, Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

"Before I ever saw a production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s iconic musical, Oklahoma! I grew up listening to the cast album in my family’s summer cabin. Songs of cowmen and surreys, of shotgun weddings and emergent states, are imprinted in me as deeply as the grooves of that vinyl record. My Croatian-born father’s father sang opera professionally in Europe. So, like the early-20th-century Jewish immigrants who crafted the American musical, its songbook affected our family’s acculturation to American ideas. Musicals offer a mode of myth-making built on integration and democratic community as well as erasure and exclusion. In a season designed in part to map these dynamics, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) staged an exuberantly queer take on Oklahoma!..." Read the full review.

-Sonja Kuftinec, PhD

Photo: “You're doin' fine, Oklahoma!” The Ensemble, including Jordan Barbour as Will Parker and Jonathan Luke Stevens as Ado Andy, sings of their home in the Oklahoma territory, which they expect will soon become a state. Photo by Jenny Graham, Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
Share on: