At the Russian Hall until July 22 and July 24-26, 2018
Tickets from $10 at leakyheaven.ca
Posted July 22, 2018
Fight With a Stick Performance (formerly Leaky Heaven Circus) is famous for genre-exploding theatre including Revolutions (in which the audience was seated on a revolve) and Cinerama (during which the tide unexpectedly came in on the audience). And now Oh What a Beautiful Morning! takes the 1955 movie musical Oklahoma! and deconstructs it.
Director Alex Lazaridis Ferguson’s notes are cogent and definitely worth reading either before or after seeing the show. Even if you don’t get around to seeing the show, they’re worth reading. Did you ever, for example, consider this Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical from this perspective: “The first thing that became obvious [when Ferguson and his students started studying the musical] was the way national identity is constructed in Oklahoma! — the way it is connected to clothing, gesture, dialect, ‘whiteness’, and especially to land. Oklahoma! was, in 1943, along with other musicals of the era, part of the propaganda that defined America in opposition to Nazi Germany. It was also part of the colonial narrative that said the land was empty and there for the taking.”
Oh What a Beautiful Morning! begins with the small audience – maybe 50 – seated on risers facing two large, wood-framed scrims separated by eight or ten meters. Suddenly, the opening image from the movie explodes on the closest scrim – huge and only meters away from those in the front row. The sky is bluer than blue, a couple of puffy clouds drift by. It feels like summer, it feels hot, we are in a cornfield. We are there. We are in both Oklahoma and Oklahoma!
And then we are moving through the cornfield. Corn stalks slash by as the camera pushes through. There is a sense of menace, of being possibly caught in a maze yet we can see in the distance green fields and a figure – or is it a horse or is it nothing at all? The music, lifted from the film, is unsettling.
Created collaboratively by Ferguson (direction), Steven Hill (dramaturg), Josh Hite (video creation), James Maxwell (composer), Paula Viitanen (technical direction), Hayley Gawthorp (performer), Hin Hilary Leung (performer), Logan Hallwas (performer), Jessica Wilke (performer), Claire Carolan (light design), Diego Romero (movement consultant), Delia Brett (movement consultant), Rita Wei (stage management), Oh What a Beautiful Morning! redefines ‘collaboration’. Every aspect of the show is completely integrated from concept and design to performance. Every lighting cue, hand-gesture, musical cue, projection is precise, tight and necessary. It’s perfect.
All of the projections have been taken directly from the film that starred Gordon MacRae, Shirley Jones, Rod Steiger, Gloria Grahame and Charlotte Greenwood but they have been re-arranged in such a way that they reveal the nastiness that’s there including white supremacy and racial stereotyping (in the character of the peddler Ali Hakim who, in the movie, sounds less Persian and more Irish).
Curious as to whether Fighting With a Stick was barking up an inappropriate tree, I took a look at the 2005-produced DVD of the 1955 film directed by Fred Zinnemann; it’s downright weird and all the menace that the Fight With a Stick team brought to the forefront is truly there. The sequence in which Laurey sniffs some smelling salts and is transported into a nightmare world is full of dark sexuality and the threat of rape. And the over the top optimism just seems laughable. The smarm is gone.
I don’t have enough savvy to comment on the technology brought to this project. There are sequences – such as the one with projections/screens/real actors and hands – that are amazing and often quite funny. Nothing that has been created did not already exist in the film; it has simply been sliced and spliced.
Oh What a Beautiful Morning! is not a play – although it is playful. It is not a romantic musical – although there is music. It is not a movie – although there is film. It is something completely new and I was as ‘high as an elephant’s eye’ when it was over.