oklahoma!

Rodgers & Hammerstein's

Oklahoma!

Music by RICHARD RODGERS

Book & Lyrics by OSCAR HAMMERSTEIN II

Based on the play "Green Grow the Lilacs" by Lynn Riggs

Original Choreography by Agnes de Mille

The Light Opera Guild has returned to its roots and will present Oklahoma!, the show credited for propelling the Guild from operetta to musical theatre, as the final production of the 70th anniversary season. Shows are scheduled for November 8, 9, 15, 16 & 22 at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday, November 10 & 24 at 2:00 p.m. at the Charleston Coliseum and Convention Center Little Theater.

A special 70th anniversary cast production of Oklahoma! (featuring performers from the 1960, 1971, 1990 and 2019 Guild productions of Oklahoma!) will be held on Saturday, November 23 at 2:00 p.m. with an anniversary celebration, dinner and party at the Coliseum & Convention Center to follow. Tickets for the November 23 events are $100.

The Broadway premiere in 1943 was a box office smash. The production helped launch many theatrical careers. Rodgers and Hammerstein were awarded a special Pulitzer Prize for Oklahoma! Award-winning Broadway revivals, national tours, international productions and innumerable regional, community and school productions have followed. The 1955 award-winning film version starred Gordon MacRae, Shirley Jones and Gene Nelson. The classic score includes Oh What a Beautiful Morning, Survey with the Fringe on Top, People Will Say We're in Love and the title song.

Rodgers & Hammerstein's first collaboration remains, in many ways, their most innovative, having set the standards and established the rules of musical theatre still being followed today. Set in a western Indian Territory just after the turn of the century, the high-spirited rivalry between the local farmers and cowboys provides the colorful background against which Curly, a handsome cowboy, and Laurey, a winsome farm girl, play out their love story. Although the road to true love never runs smooth, with these two headstrong romantics holding the reins, love's journey is as bumpy as a surrey ride down a country road. That they will succeed in making a new life together we have no doubt, and that this new life will begin in a brand-new state provides the ultimate climax to the triumphant OKLAHOMA!

Thank you to our show sponsors:

• The Dagwood Foundation
• The Greater Kanawha Valley Foundation
• Zenergy