If you’re not sure about all this - and it has, fairly, been satirized as “Woke-lahoma” - you should at least go for the first act.You’d still feel like you had a full evening and can leave, which people do, mostly feeling optimistic about the future. I wondered how they’d recast the actress Ali Stroker, who won the Tony for playing the naïve-but-naughty farmgirl Ado Annie in her wheelchair.Here, Ado Annie is played by Sis, a Black transgender woman wearing a curly blonde wig, who has the audience fully on her side from the minute she physically tosses around her much smaller love interest Will Parker (an endearing Hennessy Winkler). ![]() The lighting and staging of the tour place the focus even more on Laurey as the pure center of this tale.Played and sung skillfully by Sasha Hutchings, who understudied the role on Broadway, Laurey seems to be pondering often, seeming to wonder if something might be very, very wrong.She’s drawn to her rightful love interest Curly (Sean Grandillo), here a classic singing cowboy in the Roy Rogers tradition but with cute hair out of “High School Musical.”But she’s also both drawn to and repulsed by hired hand Jud Fry, who in this version is both the villain and the bullied, deeply damaged victim.As Jud, Christopher Bannow brings even more of a school shooter vibe than the character had on Broadway, urgently emphasizing Jud’s seething resentment at others’ sense of superiority. Re-staged for proscenium houses, the backdrop depicts a barn and a farmhouse amidst a sprawl of empty land awaiting planting - in a traditional version, that would surely be painted with corn stalks as high as an elephant’s eye.The proportions of the buildings are purposely flattened in a way that evokes American Gothic. On Broadway, where this production won the Tony Award for best revival, the show was performed in-the-round. ![]() The full personalities of the characters and performers emerge more forcefully when they sing.The songs - and oh! does this show have the songs! - sound completely different than prior takes but come across brilliantly.A traditional-radical production would turn the tunes into contemporary country, but here the pedal string guitar and the rest of the seven-member onstage band invest “Oh What a Beautiful Mornin’ ” and “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top” and the rest of one of best scores in history with a compellingly wobbly, eerie twang. ![]() Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade
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