Trivia / Oklahoma!

The stage musical

• Cut Song:
  • "Boys and Girls Like You and Me." It later turned up in Screen To Stage Adaptations of State Fair and Cinderella.
  • A song called "This Was a Real Nice Hayride" ended up cut from this show...and put in Rodgers and Hammerstein's next show, retitled "This Was a Real Nice Clambake."
• Filmed Stage Production:
  • The 1998 West End revival (starring Hugh Jackman) was filmed for television and video release. The filmed version combines footage recorded at actual performances with footage filmed in special sessions without an audience to capture close-ups and other camera angles that would be impractical to capture live.
  • A 2011 production at the University of North Carolina School for the Arts was professionally filmed for broadcast on public television, and has since been released on Youtube as a two part video. The production was notable for using archival photography, design notes, swatch books, orchestrations, and interviews with surviving members of the cast to recreate the original 1943 Broadway production as closely as possible. This seemingly simple concept was actually unprecedented due to decades of different iterations of the musical, as well as the fact that replicating every element of the production was a near impossible combination without being intentional about it: while higher-budget productions may choose to recreate the original orchestrations and Agnes de Mille's choreography, they would probably not follow Lemuel Ayers' stage design, which actually looked rather cheap by modern standards due to a limited budget, nor Miles Whites' costume design which sported an almost cartoonish-array of colors that later revivals and the more-widely seen 1955 film did away with.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The job of adapting Green Grow the Lilacs was originally offered to Rodgers and his longtime songwriting partner, Lorenz Hart, and the producers at one point announced the show as having songs by Rodgers and Hart, with Hammerstein writing only the book. However, Hart decided he wasn't interested and withdrew, ending his exclusive partnership with Rodgers, which was already under strain due to Hart's drinking. After the success of Oklahoma!, Rodgers reunited with Hart to write some new songs for a revival of one of their musicals, but Hart died of pneumonia soon after, and Rodgers and Hammerstein became exclusive partners until Hammerstein's 1960 death.
  • An animated adaptation was going to be produced by Rich Animation Studios. The critical and commercial failure of The King and I ended those plans.
• Working Title: Away We Go, until R&H decided to re-name the play after its most energetic song.

The 1955 film

• Actor-Shared Background: Like Gertie Cummings, the late Barbara Lawrence was an Oklahoma native.
• California Doubling: Nogales, Arizona stands in for Oklahoma in the 1955 film.
• Channel Hop: When Disney acquired 20th Century Fox in 2019, they acquired the rights to all of Fox's R&H films, including this one. From 2021-'23, its TODD-AO version and The Sound of Music were the only big-screen Rodgers and Hammerstein adaptations available on Disney+. In late 2023, the movie hopped again to Samuel Goldwyn Films, spiritual successor to The Samuel Goldwyn Company, who previously redistributed it to cinemas in 1982.
• Cut Song: "It's A Scandal! It's An Outrage!" and "A Lonely Room" are cut from the film version. An instrumental of the latter still plays during part of Laurey's dream ballet.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: The TODD-AO version became harder to find after the 2023 expiration of 20th Century Studios' license required them to stop selling it on DVD, Blu-ray, or digital, and for Disney+ to remove it from their service. After Samuel Goldwyn Films obtained streaming and Blu-ray rights, they only distributed the CinemaScope version.
• Milestone Celebration: In 1994, 20th Century Fox threw a belated celebration of the original Broadway production's 50th anniversary, which they promoted as the "Golden Anniversary" of Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals as a whole, by re-releasing almost every R&H theatrical movie in their possession on VHS, with bonus features consisting of an audiocassette, and either a trailer or a newsreel of the movie's premiere.
• Production Posse: In the film, just about every dancer in the Dream Ballet had worked with Agnes de Mille on a regular basis.
• Self-Adaptation: Agnes de Mille adapted her choreography from the 1943 Broadway production for the 1955 film.
• What Could Have Been: Casting options for the film included Montgomery Clift, James Dean or Paul Newman as Curly, Eva Marie Saint as Laurey, Marlon Brando or Eli Wallach as Jud Fry and Debbie Reynolds as Ado Annie Carnes.

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