In a long-ago high school production of Oklahoma!, Rauch portrayed Persian peddler Ali Hakim. “I was not well cast, to put it mildly,” he said. At an OSF staff talk in late June 2017, he stressed that he aimed to cast the Hakim role in Ashland with an actor who “self-identifies as Iranian.” In any case, Rauch has continued to love the show. And for a quarter-century he has harbored a dream about staging it in an LGBTQ+-focused way.
“I love musicals,” he said at the staff talk, “and as a gay kid and a gay adult, I felt unrepresented and shut out, and that they were not about me or people like me. And so the idea that this thing that I love—that’s a classic, that has existed—could also reflect the gay community feels very meaningful on a personal level, but also in terms of social justice and the artistic boundary-pushing that is part of what OSF does.”
In August 2016, the first steps were taken to fulfill the director’s dream when Oklahoma! was revealed as the “mystery musical” at a benefit reading for OSF’s annual Daedalus Project, which raises money to fight HIV and AIDS. The reading made the musical’s primary romantic couple, Laurey and Curly, lesbians. It made the comic sidekick couple, Will Parker and Ado Annie, gay men (with “Annie” renamed “Andy”). Ted Chapin, president and chief creative officer of R&H, gave his blessing to the proceedings, which he attended. The wheels for a full-blown production began to turn that night.
“One of the things that I learned from the reading was how sweet people found it, in the most affirming sense of that word,” Rauch recalls. “People again and again said that any misconception or fear that people would find the concept strident were pleasantly surprised by how life-affirming, warm, entertaining and ultimately moving the whole approach was.”
Rauch was elated when R&H agreed to license the production. The Festival reserved a key slot for it in the 2018 season lineup.
It’s not just the two romantic couples in the show who have been reimagined. Laurey’s starchy yet sometimes playful Aunt Eller will be a transgender woman (portrayed by a transgender female performer). Ali Hakim, said Rauch, will be “a cis-gender bisexual man” who “has a great fling with Ado Andy” but winds up married to a young woman named Gertie Cummings.
There was some discussion about whether Jud Fry, like Laurey and Curly, should be recast as a lesbian or remain a heterosexual man. Rauch opted for the latter. He felt Jud needed to be a troubled straight man who is angry that Laurey prefers a woman instead of him.
As for the sexual orientations and gender identities of the rest of the Oklahoma! community, a first-draft idea was to depict the ensemble players mostly as LGBTQ+, with a heterosexual couple or two in the mix. But that approach was later reconsidered. The revised plan was to present the chorus as “majority straight,” said Rauch, because “the world is majority straight.” He didn’t want to make the play’s setting a rural “gay mecca.” “It’s a more typical community, proportionally, in terms of sexual identity, except that we are zeroing in on the love stories of a lesbian couple and a gay male couple.” Nevertheless, OSF will look to cast both straight and LGBTQ+ actors.
Before Rauch came to OSF, he was the artistic director of Cornerstone Theater Company, which often conducted residencies in low-income communities. “In our first five years, we worked almost exclusively in rural towns with populations from 200 to 2,000 people. In every town, no matter how small, we met members of the LGBTQ+ community. In this way, this production’s focus represents the reality we encountered again and again in rural communities throughout the United States.”
The decision to move ahead with this unconventional production caused many ripples. Certain gender pronouns needed to be changed within the text, of course. Revisions to certain of Hammerstein’s lyrics were required. And the musical arrangements also needed alteration, because, in the case of Curly, a female voice will now sing a man’s vocal line (and vice versa in the case of Ado Andy).