The utopic vision of OSF's Oklahoma!: Recuperative casting practices and queering early American history1. Issue 1 (1st April 2021)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Mantoan, Lindsey
• Is Part Of: Studies in musical theatre. Volume 15:Issue 1(2021)
• Page Start: 41
• Page End: 56
• Publication Date: 2021-04-01
• Subjects: Musical theater -- Periodicals; 782.105
• DOI: 10.1386/smt_00054_1
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1750-3159

Abstract

In the spring of 2018, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) realized artistic director Bill Rauch's decades-long dream: to produce a queer, interracial Oklahoma!. The production participates in a new practice of recasting history through musical theatre, and does so through an innovative approach to representation and character. OSF's production reimagined Curly as a queer Black woman; the matriarch of the town, Aunt Eller, as a trans woman; and the secondary romantic couple, Will Parker and Ado Annie (here Ado Andy), as an interracial, gay male partnership. This alteration of the characters' identities takes a bold new step in the trajectory of theatrical casting practices, challenging the entrenched white supremacy and patriarchy of the theatre industry. In this article, I situate OSF's method of casting Oklahoma!, which I call 'recuperative casting', in the landscape of broader discourse related to casting and musicals that represent US history; I argue that this casting strategy seeks to remedy the whitewashing typical of productions of canonical musicals.