The Pick-a-Little, Talk-a-Little Ladies of River City, Iowa ain’t got nuthin’ on the district administrators and school board of Sherman, Texas.
Don’t remember the Pick-a-Little Ladies? They’re the gossipy gaggle of book banning biddies who take time out of their perpetual puncturing of their neighbors’ foibles to rail against the presence of classic works by Chaucer, Rabelais and (horrors) Balzac in the local library.
The Sherman Independent School District honchos are the hypersensitive monitors of morals who have found shocking sexuality and impermissible profanity in the beloved 1943 classic Oklahoma!, widely acknowledged as a turning point in the development of modern musical theatre.
Oklahoma! has been performed tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of times around the world on stages large and small, professional, amateur and academic. It was the most popular musical on high school stages in the 1960s and 70s and the second most popular in the 1980s and 90s, demonstrating that thousands of teachers, principals, superintendents and school boards have found it to be a wholly acceptable, even ideal, show for their students across decades.
One key difference in the two aforementioned groups: the Pick-a-Little Ladies aren’t real, but instead are characters in another beloved musical, The Music Man, created by Meredith Willson to puncture the hypocrisy of small-town, small-minded self-appointed arbiters of what is right and wrong. The Sherman ISD folks are alive and well imposing their ridiculous regulations on what was heretofore an unassailable standard of the American theatrical repertoire.
When we last left the Sherman ISD crew, they had announced that the already-cast high school production of Oklahoma!, slated for performance in December, was being recast, specifically targeting any student who had a role of the opposite gender from their own. This edict came down in order to displace Max Hightower, a trans boy who had been cast in the secondary role of the traveling peddler Ali Hakim. It seems that the Sherman ISD leaders couldn’t countenance a trans boy acting a role in a comical love triangle, so they invented new rules to stigmatize every gay, trans, non-binary, and queer student under their thumbs, even managing to displace some of the straight kids as well.
But one week after their ham-handed actions raised an outcry from local students, parents and, increasingly, the media, the Sherman ISD brain trust announced late Friday afternoon that they had found a solution to this problem of their own creation. Declaring the script and score of Oklahoma! that has delighted generations on stage and film to have been intended for “older audiences,” they patted themselves on the back for moving forward with an alternate Oklahoma!, “a musical that showcases each student’s talents while also being age appropriate, with no concerns over content, stage production/props, and casting. By utilizing a new version that’s age appropriate, sex will not be considered when casting the new production. Students will be able to play any part, regardless of whether the sex of the character aligns with the sex of the student assigned at birth.”
How did they achieve such a magical transformation of such trash as one of the important musicals in the history of the form? In a move that would have made the Pick-a-Little Ladies proud, they have opted produce the Oklahoma! Youth Edition, a version of the show so cut down that in contrast to the original, which according to the licensing house Concord Theatricals runs more than two hours, the young people of Sherman will be required to only be on stage for an hour. Yes, the Oklahoma! Youth Edition might be more appropriately called Highlights from Oklahoma! (Minus All the Not Very Naughty Bits).
Taking a closer look at the Concord website, one can easily find that this truncated Oklahoma! being produced at a high school wasn’t designed for high schools. The site states, “In this adaptation for pre-high school students, the content has been edited to better suit younger attention spans.” There’s even one character from the show who has entirely disappeared, as the number of male principals has dropped from 6 to 5. Without immediate access to the Youth script, one can surmise that the missing man could well be the ill-natured (and perpetually ostracized) Jud Fry, that fly in the ointment in the otherwise placid settler community.
What’s evident is that in their rush to eradicate anything that goes against their desire to keep Sherman safe only for cisgendered heterosexuals, they have decided to infantilize the entire student body by giving them the opportunity to perform and see not Oklahoma! but Oklahoma!-lite, a skeletal script reworked to take an impressionable pre-teen from song to song without the slightest spectre of sensuality, and to be sure, it’s pretty slight in most Oklahoma! productions to begin with, sublimated into song and dance.
Heaping a dollop of self-congratulation on themselves in yesterday’s statement, the Sherman ISD spin doctors “thank our community for the care and patience they have shown as we have navigated these difficult circumstances.” There was nothing difficult until these folks decided to make it so and they haven’t demonstrated the slightest care for a significant number of their students, least of all Max Hightower, who found love, acceptance and understanding everywhere except from the Sherman ISD leadership.
As for patience, segments of the community shouted that they can say no from the moment the decision came down one week earlier. The outcry forced the cadre that exerts their will over Sherman students to bumble into another decision which only reinforces their fear of high schoolers encountering anything that doesn’t advance the America seen in such sitcoms as Leave It To Beaver and Father Knows Best. That happens to the be the very same era in which the film of Oklahoma! was a box office hit.
With a Board of Education meeting looming in Sherman on Monday evening and the board itself thinking it has tied up everything quite neatly, they are likely to learn during public comments that their alarm over a masterpiece of musical theatre and their disdain for children they’re supposed to be building into smart, compassionate adults has fallen flat. They would do well to listen to the wise words of the character of Aunt Eller in Oklahoma!, mildly profane but also utterly humane, who seeks to quell a community conflict with this lyric, which along with the entire script and score won a Pulitzer Prize in 1944, a declaration that all people are created equal, with equal rights:
I’d like to teach you all a little sayin’
And learn the words by heart the way you should
I don’t say I’m no better than anybody else,
But I’ll be damned if I ain’t jist as good!
Update, November 11, 5 pm: In response to questions regarding the situation with Oklahoma! at Sherman High School, the licensing house Concord Theatricals provided the following statement, reproduced in its entirety:
“Equity, diversity, inclusion and freedom of speech are key tenets for Concord Theatricals as champions of authors and artists. We encourage all producing organizations to consider diversity and inclusion in their casting choices.
Concord Theatricals supports our licensees and all who work on their productions, so long as they adhere to their contractual agreement and do not enact unauthorized content changes.
Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! is a classic title that has been performed in its entirety thousands of times across the U.S. since it debuted 80 years ago, including in High Schools. Concord Theatricals additionally offers a popular 60-minute Youth Edition designed especially for young performers; we can confirm that Sherman has now applied for this version.”
UPDATE: For the resolution of this situation following a school board meeting, posted on November 14, click here.
Background of lead image photographed at the Museum of Broadway’s Oklahoma! exhibit in New York.
