The first act of the musical Oklahoma! ends with a ten minute dream ballet. In the ballet, farm girl Laurey Williams imagines marrying cowboy Curley McLain. Then, farmhand Jud Fry appears in the dream, killing Curley. Laurey is troubled by all this, and when she wakes up, she realizes Curley is the man she wants to marry, but she already agreed to go to the box social dance with Jud. The curtain drops. It’s intermission.
Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! — which opened eighty years ago on March 31, 1943 — was groundbreaking. As illustrated by this dream ballet sequence, Oklahoma! offered a thorough integration of song, dance, and story to drive narrative and provide insight into character. The New York Herald Tribune declared in its 1943 review: “Songs, dances, and a story have been triumphantly blended.”
At the time, this was a rarity in musical theater. While many of these structural and narrative innovations were laid out in the musicals of the 1930s, Oklahoma! codified them and reached an unprecedented level of success. The week after the show opened, its advance sales were $25,000 (when top ticket prices were around $5), which meant the show was sold out for the first four years of its run. The show ran for over 2,200 performances, which puts it — to this day— as the 35th longest running Broadway show.
Just as Oklahoma! opened on Broadway, the music recording industry was at a standstill. In the first half of the 20th century, how people listened to music changed. Recorded music had become ubiquitous. Phonographs and jukeboxes were everywhere. Because of this, the livelihoods of trained musicians were at risk. Artists were feeling disenfranchised by corporations making huge profits of previously recorded music, so to fight for the wages and benefits of musicians, the American Federation of Musicians (the leading musicians’ union) went on strike in 1942. Thus, by the spring of 1943 — when Oklahoma! opened — new recordings had nearly ground to a halt.
At the time, in the early 1940s, the music of Broadway often stayed in New York City. Some songs from Broadway musicals were covered as singles by celebrities (for instance, Frank Sinatra recorded a cover of Oklahoma!’s “People Will Say We’re in Love”), but these releases were rare and didn’t replicate the experience of seeing the show live. They existed without the show’s narrative context, they were often overly-orchestrated in their rearrangements, and they were sung by celebrities showing off their vocal prowess rather than attempting to embody the emotional state of the characters.
Enter Jack Kapp, head of Decca Records. Kapp believed the Broadway musical was an untapped market opportunity: If the records were properly packaged with photographs and explanatory notes, the album could not only prove a commercial success but could also give people across America a taste of Broadway.
Given the commercial success of Oklahoma!, Kapp wanted to produce an album of the show’s songs, but there was a problem: The musicians’ strike. So he struck a deal with the unions, agreeing to contribute a royalty percentage to the union-run pension fund.
Kapp worked quickly to make an Oklahoma! album. Typically, for Broadway recordings, new arrangements were commissioned, but Kapp didn’t have the time, so he brought the entire Oklahoma! Broadway orchestra into the recording studio, under the direction of the show’s original conductor Jay Blackton.
The Oklahoma! album was the first original Broadway cast album — the first album of Broadway songs that used the theatrical orchestrations, the Broadway orchestra, and the Broadway cast. Kapp’s Oklahoma! album set the norm for cast albums.
However, this Oklahoma! album was far from the complete theatrical experience. At the time, phonographs used shellac disks that had to be turned over every three and a half minutes. Because of this technological limitation, every song is shorter than three and a half minutes. Most of the twelve songs on the album were cut and condensed in some way from their Broadway versions. Conductor Jay Blackton said of the recording experience: “Sometimes a song we’d be recording would time out too long for the record side and Jack would come out of the control booth and say, ‘How about it, a little faster, maybe?’ So I’d speed up the tempo a bit to fit the record.”
Three songs, a couple reprises, and Okalahoma!’s signature dream ballet were left off the album. The songs not included were the show’s darker ones. For instance, the show’s darkest number — “Lonely Room,” in which farmhand Jud sings of his isolation and desire for revenge — is left off. If you listen to this original album with no knowledge of the show, you’ll probably think Oklahoma! is a happy-go-lucky story of life on the frontier.
By Christmas 1943, the album had sold 125,000 units, and in May 1944, Kapp brought the Oklahoma! orchestra and cast together again to record an extended version, which included the songs left off the first time. The souvenir booklet that accompanied this extended version underscored how the album brought Broadway home for everyday Americans: “Decca carries the Oklahoma! music into any and all American homes on records; these two albums together permitting enjoyment of the play from start to finish — right in your own easy-chair — with members of the original cast, chorus, and orchestra.”
Kapp’s Oklahoma! albums established the cast album as a staple of both the recording industry and Broadway. Today, the cast album is how most Americans engage with Broadway. And, thanks to advances in recording technology, the limitations that restricted the length and number of songs on that original Oklahoma! album are gone. Many albums now include interstitial dialogue, contextualizing songs and further developing narrative. For instance, Hamilton, which was recorded digitally, captured their full two and a half hour show in one album (minus a reprise, left out at Miranda’s request).
Today, these albums allow you — no matter where you live — to experience the power of musical storytelling. They allow you to attend the tale, to hear the story of tonight, to listen to the music of the night, to go on a great adventure, to visit the barricades, to viva la vie boheme, and to ride in a surrey with a fringe on the top.
Epilogue: On Oklahoma!’s cultural relevance during World War II.
Thanks to Kapp’s albums, the songs of Oklahoma! traversed the nation. Coinciding with the tension of World War II, the show’s message of hopefulness, resilience, and resonated with Americans. Celeste Holm, who played Ado Annie, once recalled how her grandmother, the chairwoman of the drama committee of the New York State Federation of Women’s Clubs, told her Oklahoma! was “the most wonderful musical for right now, when people are going to fight for this country, and may die for it, to be reminded of the kind of courage, the unselfconscious courage, that settled this country.”
Reflecting upon his time on the battlefront in Sicily in 1943, war correspondent John Hersey recalled: “I’d had a pretty crummy night, sleeping on the ground, muddy and damp, nothing to look forward to but cold C-rations for breakfast. A G.I. who might perfectly well get killed that day (because though the Italians were retreating, there were some nasty skirmishes) got up and stripped to the waist and poured some cold water in his helmet and began to shave. The sun hit us. Everyone was grumbling as usual. Suddenly the soldier stood up and began singing, ‘Oh, what a beautiful morning.’ A pretty good voice. There was a fair amount of irony in his singing, and his pals laughed. All the same, it was a beautiful morning, and all of a sudden there was an almost unbearable intensity in the way the men looked around at the view.”
Notes.
This post is largely adapted from chapter five of Laurence Maslon’s book Broadway to Main Street, which is an excellent history of the Broadway cast album. Maslon wrote a New York Times article on the Oklahaoma! album here.
For more on the cultural influence of Oklahoma!, see Todd Purdom’s New York Times op-ed here.