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Toby's Dinner Theatre - Columbia
5900 Symphony Woods Road
Columbia MD 21044
301-596-6161

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Professional dinner theater
Owner and Artistic Director Toby Orenstein
Also check out Toby's Baltimore
 Five musicals a year staged in the round
Click here to see archived reviews for this theater

  Seat comfort
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No Metro access
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Oklahoma!
June 11 - August 30, 2009
Tuesday - Saturday at 8:15 pm
Sunday at 7:15 pm
Wednesday and Sunday at 12:30 pm
Buffet begins two hours before curtain
Reviewed June 19 by Brad Hathaway

Solid staging, fine singing and spirited dancing
Running time 2:40 - one intermission
Tickets $33 - $51

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The first Rodgers and Hammerstein collaboration is a show every lover of musical theater should revisit from time to time. In between visits, memory starts to play funny tricks, and you tend to remember just the sweet simplicity, the lovely score, the charming humor, the innocent bloom of young love and the attachment to the land so celebrated in the title song. All those things are there in abundance, but there's more depth, more seriousness and more pure drama than you may remember. Oklahoma! is not just a show about a young woman's difficulty picking between a charming young cowboy and a hired hand with a disturbing collection of pin ups on his bunk house room. This humongous hit of the 1940s was a phenomenon because it accomplished such a complete blending of simple charm and darker complications as to seem completely seamless. Director/choreographer Mark Minnick keeps most of those elements in balance and draws satisfying performances from a talented cast. However, the small live orchestra fails to match the quality or charm of the other elements.

Storyline: In the first decade of the twentieth century, as the people of the Oklahoma Territory look forward to statehood, two young women have man trouble. There's Laurey, who is being courted by charming young cowboy called Curly when Jud, a surly hired hand, enters the equation. The other is Ado Annie, who "Cain't Say No!" to her boyfriend who is just back from Kansas City, but her father has already used his shotgun to convince a traveling peddler to marry her. Things take a fatal turn when Jud and Curly compete for Laurey's box lunch at the sociable.

The American musical had been evolving toward a more integrated, serious form of entertainment for decades before Rodgers and Hammerstein crafted this confection with a solid story told in part by dialogue, part by song and part by dance. It struck a chord in the hearts of a war-weary nation when it opened in 1943. Oscar Hammerstein II, who had been a major force in developing the form for twenty years, but who hadn't had a hit in nearly a decade, teamed with Richard Rodgers, who had just about had it with the unreliability and difficulty of working with his long-time partner Lorenz Hart. Oklahoma! was a hit of enormous proportions, running for over five years on Broadway, hitting big again in London, becoming a Cinemascope 35 and Todd-AO 70 movie and being revived on Broadway four times. It was the start of a new partnership which, over the next sixteen years, added Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I and The Sound of Music to the list of classic American musicals.

The show is famous for beginning not with a chorus line of pretty girls, but with a single male voice off stage singing "Oh, What A Beautiful Mornin'." Here that voice is Jake Odmark's. He has just the right blend of swagger and charm as Curly. "Many a New Day," one of the finest mergers of words and music in theater history, is given a charmingly light delivery by Jessica Lauren Ball, who is as "purty" a Laurey as any Curly would want. Adam Grabau, who was so good as the demented Nazi in Toby's The Producers, comes up with a strong performance at the other end of the emotional spectrum as the troubled hired hand who nurses grudges in his "Lonely Room." The secondary story of Ado Annie isn't given short shrift in its casting. Annie is Elizabeth Rayca, displaying skill as a singing comedienne. Jeffrey Shankle brings energy to his singing and dancing as her beaux back from Kansas City (where "everything is up to date") while Vishal Vaidya lands most of the laughs reserved for the Persian peddler.

A significant element of any production of the show has to be the execution of the dream dance which ends the first act. Rachel Schur is as graceful as one could want as the "Dream Laurey." Surprisingly, the orchestra seems to rise to the minimum requirements for this exclusively instrumental segment. It is during the vocal work that the orchestra's weakness and thinness becomes a distraction, drawing attention away from the glories of the score.

Music by Richard Rodgers. Book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II. Directed and choreographed by Mark Minnick. Musical direction by Reenie Codelka. Design: David A. Hopkins (set) Samn Huffer (costumes) Lynn Joslin (lights) Drew Dedrick (sound) Kirstine Christiansen (photography) Drew Dedrick and Terrence Sweeney (stage managers). Cast: MaryLee Adams, Frank Anthony, Trish Baker, Jessica Lauren Ball, Parker Drown, Joel Adam Gerlach, Adam Grabau, Andrew Horn, Chris Jehnert, Shawn Kettering, Katie Keyser, Jordan Klein, Jen Kohlhafer, Julia Lancione, Darren McDonnell, Jake Odmark, Elizabeth Rayca, Rachel Schur, Jeffrey Shankle, Christen Svangos, Susan Thornton, Vishal Vaidya, Kate Williams, Victoria Winter.