Oklahoma!

On Friday night I went to see the UC Davis production of Oklahoma!, the well-known, much-loved Rogers and Hammmerstein musical. That was excellent. The story is a little corny, but the music is superb and the production was top-notch. They had brought in a few professional performers for some of the lead roles, but the majority of the cast were students (and a few community people). The orchestra was made up completely of students and staff.

While the music and the acting/singing were good, the highlight was the staging. As people were coming into the theatre, there was a picture of a farm scene (farmhouse, fence, windmill, etc.) projected onto the stage curtain/screen. As the play started, the lights on stage brightened and the screen raised slowly revealing that it was actually a gauze screen and that the scene that had been projected was actually the same as the stage setting, giving this amazing effect of "fading" from two-dimensions into three. They used the same trick in a few other places — very impressive and very effective (I guess they did spend $185,000 on the production — i.e. somewhere around R1.5million!).