Pretty like the Girl: Gender, Race and Oklahoma!

Abstract

Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! (1943), conceived in collaboration with choreographer Agnes de Mille and others, has achieved an unparalleled status in musical theater history and continues to remain popular through amateur and professional revivals. My article first explores the work's genesis in Lynn Riggs' play about the Oklahoma Territory of his early childhood and Hammerstein's subsequent revisions to make the work conform to the conventions of a nostalgic romance plot. Drawing on primary sources, I examine in detail the musical, textual and choreographic characterization of gender, ethnicity and class within this romance plot and demonstrate that Oklahoma! capitalized on gendered and racialized dialects, musical practices and specific kinds of movement that marked the characters and their particular roles. Riggs' turn-of-the-twentieth-century rural setting, Rodgers' choice to limit syncopation, long a hallmark of the musical theatre repertory and a marker of urban musical ‘blackness’, and de Mille's use of white folk dance and balletic movement vocabularies, served to re-center domesticated white, gendered bodies on the American musical stage. While Ado Annie and Laurey set up the well-worn, if comic, virgin/whore dichotomy that circumscribes appropriate modes of gender and class-based femininity, Curly's character presented a compelling image of white masculine self-sufficiency that proved especially salient within the context of World War II and continues to prove so.