Cowboy Curly McClain tries to win the heart of a girl in a singing and dancing extravaganza.
Director: Trevor Nunn
Stars: Maureen Lipman, Hugh Jackman, Josefina Gabrielle.
Warren Carlyle ... assistant choreographer
Susan Stroman ... choreographer
Agnes de Mille: dance design of original production (I saw some such credit on the credits, but it's not in IMDb; I'm not going to try finding it again to add it.)
borrowed dvd
14 songs in the Soundtracks.
Sheer torture. Much too long.
Filmed stage play, with infrequent audience response and no intermission marked (unless it was a brief title card that I missed).
I've never liked the film Oklahoma! (1955), 7- Color, WS, and sort of thought it was Gordon MacRae. Nope. I really don't like the show: the songs, the characters, the story. And then Trevor Nunn had the bright idea to restore all the cut numbers/text. OMG.
I was very impressed that we did not get separate dream and waking Lauries and Curlys. But I didn't really enjoy the dancing here. Some of it was the way it was photographed. Some of it was the baggy wardrobe worn by the ensemble... or were the men really as paunchy as they looked? Seems unlikely. (There was a black cowboy who did a very impressive midair split-leap.)
This has much more violence than I remember from the film; probably some of the restored scenes. Rod Steiger from the film still gets my vote for scariest Jud, but the guy in this play is plenty dirty and creepy.
I would love to see HJ in more musical roles, but not this one ever again.
The Making of doc'y was far more interesting. And only 24 min, the only content of the disc 2.
Rated 8.0 (1,633)
(none), dir. Nunn; 5
