What Broadway Musicals have to say about our Difficult Conflicts

Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from the new book, “Broadway Nation,” by David Armstrong, for 18 years the artistic director of Seattle’s 5th Ave Theatre.

One of the singular strengths of the Broadway musical form is its effectiveness at dramatizing and bringing to life entire communities of people — and in many musicals, the community itself becomes a major character in the drama. As a result of this natural ability, dozens of Broadway musicals — including many of the most popular, acclaimed, and influential — focus nearly as much on the triumphs and tribulations of the community in the story as they do on those of the individual central characters.

In fact, in these musicals, the fate and fortunes of the heroine or hero are closely tied to and dependent upon the ability of the community to thrive and function, and visa-versa.

Collectively, Broadway musicals strongly advocate for the vital importance of humans coming together and forming harmonious, well-functioning communities — even if that means individuals have to compromise or give something up to achieve it. In fact, I would argue that musicals most often are telling us that we must give something up to achieve that goal, for the greater good of all concerned.

In the context of the polarization and violent conflicts of today’s world, “a healing compromise” might be hard to imagine, much less possible to achieve anytime soon. But, as always, I find that these “frivolous Broadway musicals” are actually profoundly inspiring works of art that still have much to teach us.

It was probably inevitable that community would become one of the principal themes of the musical because the central dynamics of a community are baked into the process, form, and structure of musical theater. Choral singing, group dancing, and playacting are natural, indigenous, universal communal activities that, throughout human history, have been tied to meaningful events in the life of a community: the changing of the seasons, the harvest, marriages, and all manner of civic rituals and religious celebrations.

“Territory Folks Should Stick Together.”

This makes those events ideal vehicles for musical theater writers to draw on and tap into when they want to insightfully reflect and reveal the feelings and values of a community…And since stories are driven by conflict — if you are telling a story about a community, you will need to include characters that are in conflict with the community.

Often, this is someone who is a dissenter or outcast from the community — and they become the antagonist. Or you might have subgroups of the community in conflict with each other. Rodgers and Hammerstein brilliantly employed all of these elements in Oklahoma! in such songs as “Territory Folks Should Stick Together.”

What exactly is the central conflict within the community of Oklahoma!? What is the cause of the tension and disagreement? For audiences today, this can often be hard to grasp, even though it is clearly stated in the text, and there’s an entire song spelling it out for us. That song, “The Farmer and The Cowman,” can seem like just a lighthearted hoedown intended only to get the second act off to a lively start. But a well-thought-out production of Oklahoma! will help the audience understand that this song is actually laying out the central theme of the entire show.

The “range wars” that took place across the western United States around the turn of the century were intense and sometimes violent conflicts over the use of the land. As the song tells us, the cowmen wanted wide open ranges where their cattle could roam free and easily be driven to market. The farmers, however, wanted the land to be fenced in and controlled so that their crops would be protected from being eaten or trampled. In an agrarian society — which America certainly was in 1906 when the story of Oklahoma! takes place, and to a great extent, still remained in 1943 when the musical was first produced — these are make-or-break, life-and-death issues.

This is one of the most difficult aspects of the show to convey to modern audiences, but it is crucial to the storytelling. Dramatically, the farmers and the cowmen represent opposing values. The farmers represent civilization — the settlement of the land and the establishment of schools, churches, and families. The picnic basket auction that figures so prominently in Oklahoma!’s plot is being held to raise money to build a new schoolhouse. This is not arbitrary — the playwrights made that choice on purpose in order to underline this issue.

The cowboys, on the other hand, represent untethered freedom and a very American ideal of self-reliance and self-determination. Cole Porter, in spite of being the least likely person ever to write a cowboy song, captured this idea perfectly when he wrote, “Oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies above, /don’t fence me in. /Let me ride through the wide-open country that I love, /don’t fence me in.” The cowboys represent what have traditionally been seen as “masculine values,” and the farmers represent traditional “feminine values” and concerns.

We could also define this conflict as being between libertarian values and communitarian values. Libertarians seek to maximize political freedom and autonomy, emphasizing freedom of choice — another very American philosophy as exemplified by the early American flag and motto, “Don’t tread on me.” Communitarian beliefs are also very American, with the basic principle being that “we are all in this together.”

This conflict is at the heart of Oklahoma!, and the musical dramatizes how these conflicting values can come into balance. What happens at the end of Oklahoma!? Two couples, Laurey and Curly and Ado Annie and Will Parker — each composed of a female farmer and a male cowman, and embodying both sides of the conflict — join together in the partnership, collaboration, and compromise of marriage. Their shared love of the land will bring an end to the range wars.

The two groups will still have differences, but they will find ways to compromise and work together for the sake of the community and the land that they love. In the show’s title song, one lyric line reoccurs three times: “We know we belong to the land /and the land we belong to is grand.”

The Outsiders

Let’s now turn our attention to that other source of dramatic conflict: the dissenter, nonconformist, or outcast from the community. Oklahoma! has one of those as well, the groundbreaking character of Jud Fry. Oklahoma! was a new invention — a musical play as opposed to a musical comedy or operetta — and Jud Fry has a lot to do with that. Without him, the dramatic stakes of the story and its thematic depth would be greatly diminished.

What does Jud represent to this community? The most recent Broadway revival of Oklahoma! in 2019 was extremely controversial, and people either loved it or hated it. Wags quickly dubbed it “Wokelahoma,” because, as directed by Daniel Fish, that stripped-down, modern-dress production was seen by many as trying way too hard to reframe and reinterpret (or perhaps misinterpret?) the show for a contemporary audience. And I would have to agree.

However, one thing that production got exactly right was its depiction of Jud. He was portrayed as an “incel” — a young, misogynistic, heterosexual man who feels so frustrated by his lack of sexual experience and romantic success and so alienated and shut out from society that he becomes an angry, disgruntled, and violent threat to his community.

And it was immediately clear that this was who Jud had always been. Jud is neither a farmer nor a cowman but rather a hired hand who comes into the community as a stranger. He does not belong to the land. None of that would necessarily be a problem. A different person coming into the same situation could presumably have become integrated into the community and possibly even ended up marrying Laurey.

But not this guy. He has serious mental and emotional issues. There is something dark and twisted about him. He starts off creepy and grows more and more unhinged. But, amazingly, early in the show, Rodgers and Hammerstein give him an “I Am/I Want song” in which he reveals his interior world and deepest feelings — his pain at feeling outcast, inadequate, rejected, and trapped inside his own mind—his “Lonely Room,” as the song is titled.

This song engenders surprising empathy from the audience for Jud. We really feel for him. But that only goes so far, because in the scene just prior to that song, Jud seemed to have boasted about killing an entire family (“burned up the father, mother and daughter”) on another farm where he worked after finding the girl “in the hayloft with another fellow.” Or, at the very least, he expressed his great admiration for the hired hand who did kill them.

Then, in Act Two, we witness Jud’s intense anger and threatening words after Laurey rejects his sexual advances and, depending on how it is staged, thwarts his attempted rape. The question that Oklahoma! then poses is, what does society do with a person like that? How do we help them? Can they somehow be integrated into society? And if not, what do we do then?

At the climax of the show, with our very own eyes, we see Jud pull out a knife and violently attack Curly, who is forced to fight back in self-defense. They struggle violently, and Curly “succeeds in throwing him” and, as Hammerstein’s stage directions clearly state, “JUD falls on his own knife.” Oklahoma! opened in March, 1943, in the middle of World War II, when America, and much of the world, was being forced to fight back in self-defense against the violent aggression of the Axis powers.

I do not think this is a coincidence. This was art reflecting life. And it is not at all a stretch to view Hitler as the ultimate incel (“a member of an online community of young men who consider themselves unable to attract women sexually”). Throughout the first two and a half years of Oklahoma!’s original run, the allied forces,led by America, were having to do battle with elements who did not want to be part of the world community and who were, in fact, violently trying to break up and destroy that community. Sometimes, the community has no choice but to fight back to save itself, or disappear forever.

This is classic mythic storytelling: the character who is against the community and endangering its existence has to die. To save the community, the threat has to be vanquished.

Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine would grapple with this same dynamic many years later in Into the Woods and brilliantly illuminate the moral dilemmas and complications that come with it. To save the community of this show, The Giant’s Wife must be killed. But as Sondheim and Lapine make sure to remind us, there are always two sides to every story: “Witches can be right, giants can be good./You decide what’s right, you decide what’s good.”