Never have I once looked back to sigh.

Oklahoma! opened on Broadway 80 years ago this Friday. The line is that Oklahoma! changed musical theater completely and for good by fully integrating the music and dance with the characters and the story. Showboat kind of did that 16 years earlier, but Showboat was a bit wooly in spots, whereas Oklahoma! was a seamless masterpiece. It’s puzzling to me that so much time elapsed between the two, especially since Hammerstein wrote both. Oklahoma! seems, at least looking back from here, like it would’ve come right after.

I grew up with the film and loved it, still do, I can listen to Shirley Jones sing those songs all day long, but I didn’t realize until I was much older just how much the movie bowdlerized the show. I think the first real production I saw (and only on video) was the Trevor Nunn version, the one with Hugh Jackman, which revealed how disturbing and how sexy the show is. I still think of that production as the definitive interpretation, though I’m not sure how much that means since I’ve only ever seen one other, the 2019 Broadway “revival,” which I saw before it moved to Broadway, but I understand that it transfered pretty much intact. (I think it’s playing on the West End now, if you want to see it and don’t mind the commute.)

The 2019 production was wonderful in its way, but, for me, succeeded as a powerful piece of agitprop but not as an interpretation of a complex work of musical theater. The reason it made such a big splash — besides some great performances (Mary Testa knocked my socks off), the thrill of being just a few feet away from all that exquisite ensemble singing, and the brilliant new orchestration that put the score more squarely in traditional folk territory but retained the nuance and detail of the original (the orchestration was for me the real miracle of that production) — is that it played to audiences sympathetic to its point of view. It’s hard to gauge how persuasive it was as political theater when I imagine few people saw it who needed persuading. It was definitely effective as a way for people to announce their own politics by praising it.

Oklahoma! is and was always about the violence and darkness at the heart of the creation of “America,” and it is about the optimism there, too. It’s about the tension between those two things. The tension between those two things is America, and that’s why the show resonates so powerfully. What idea could be more “relevant” right now? If you strip the show of its sunniness, it’s just a lecture. It no longer makes sense as a piece of theater about human beings in the world. What I really want is the Bartlett Sher Oklahoma! He’s the director who understands that to make these so-called golden age musicals relevant, or maybe a better word is legible, to audiences today, you go to the text. It’s all there. If someone is telling you these shows are simplistic and hokey, they have misunderstood them.

To possibly stretch this argument a little too far, recently I was talking with friends about movies (in particular, the way many people watch them now, in pieces, while they’re doing other things, seldom just sitting still and quiet for the whole thing), and the two younger people in the group said that they just don’t have the power of attention to sit still and concentrate that long. I believe that if you are not devoting your attention to the work on its own terms, you’re having a seriously diminished experience of the work, and I wonder if, or suspect that, this generational change in mental capacity is not just a contraction of duration but of depth. Maybe people now, for whatever reasons, have trouble not only with long concentration but also deep concentration. Maybe humans are increasingly unable to process subtext and complexity. Maybe you have to fill a whole wall of the theater floor to ceiling with guns, maybe it’s necessary for all the performers to scowl and sneer through all the cheery songs, in order for the audience to understand that the play is about darkness and fear and violence.

As much as I loved the distilled score in 2019, I’d kill to hear the full original orchestrations.