Oh What a Beautiful Morning!

O-K-L-A-H-O-M-A! Is it even possible for a native Oklahoman to read those letters without breaking into song, at least internally? Not for me. A big part of factchecking at Oklahoma Today is verifying each letter of every proper noun in the magazine. As you can imagine, Oklahoma appears often. So when I factcheck just about anything, I end up signing that lovely refrain over, and over, and over. It is probably very irritating, but I keep my office door closed most of the time.

When I came across Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1955 musical movie Oklahoma! streaming on Disney Plus recently, I realized I was familiar with it, but I couldn’t recall ever having seen the whole thing. As a decade-plus OKT employee, I felt a twinge of failure. So I did some research to prepare myself and I learned some very interesting facts.

Lynn Riggs wrote the play Green Grow the Lilacs, on which Oklahoma! is based. I learned that early on in my Oklahoma Today days, but I didn’t know that Riggs was Cherokee, and the only Native American dramatist writing Broadway in the early twentieth century. His work explored the Cherokee Nation’s social upheaval as Oklahoma looked toward statehood. In fact, you can watch the U.S. Naval Academy theater troupe’s 2010 performance at the National Museum of the American Indian here. Riggs was given 1 percent of the royalties for Oklahoma! When he died, those went to his brother William Edgar Riggs. Since William’s wife died of heart disease and his daughter died of cancer, upon his death he left those royalties to the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation. As of 2018, that gift has netted OMRF more than $700,000.

So then I watched it. It was magical and horrifying in turn. I was dazzled and delighted. I was confused…most of the time. I won’t recap the whole plot because it’s very long, but here are the highlights as I see it.

-“Oh What a Beautiful Morning” is such a lovely way to start the day and the movie. Also, how could Laurey play hard to get after hearing Curly sing about anything? She crazy. That man’s voice is as sweet and thick as molasses.

-The Kansas City Ballet is the first of FIVE ballet numbers. That’s at least four more than I was expecting in a musical about territorial Oklahoma!

-These terrible—oh I’m sorry, turruhble—accents. This may sound like a complaint, but I love how you never quite know how each actor will say any given word. Fridee, idee, modren, oughter… Speaking of which…

-“I Cain’t Say No.” I cain’t expound too much on this one, but my summer project is memorizing the entire song.

-“People Will Say We’re in Love.” Gordon McRae and Shirley McClain—in her first movie!—are so charming throughout this duet. Had this been a Disney movie, there probably would have been little cartoon bluebirds fluttering around them.

-“Pore Jud is Daid.” Firstly, I feel so liberated from the tyrant that is autocorrect right now. Second, this song is an attempt by our protagonist, Curly, to get the farmhand, Jud (R & H couldn’t even dignify him with a second d?) to kill himself so he can take a girl to a dance. Jud isn’t forcing said girl; he asked her, and she agreed. And all of this could have been avoided if Curly and Laurey COULD COMMUNICATE BETTER. It’s problematic by today’s standards to say the least. But hey, love is complicated, and this movie is sixty-six years old.

-“The Farmer and the Cowman.” They should be friends! Though I’m pretty sure we square danced to this in middle school, I can overlook my past shame because it’s just so fun.

-“Oklahoma!” The piece de resistance. Thank goodness this song is a banger, because you have to wait about 140 minutes for it. But no matter the wait, hearing “Oklahoma!” always makes me feel a swell of pride for my home state. It’s a grand declaration full of hope and determination—one of the few things in the movie that feels authentically connected to the state. That number eclipses any lows—"Out of My Dreams” could have been suffocated with a pillow as far as I’m concerned—and it makes for an epic ending to one of the greatest, and probably most inaccurate, musicals of all time. In fact, it might be the best ending to anything ever.

O-K-L-A-H-O-M-A! Oklahoma!

Written By

Karlie Ybarra

Managing editor Karlie Ybarra loves to explore her home state—and meet many of its animal citizens—any chance she gets.