‘Oklahoma!’ review
Interview: Anoushka Lucas, the struggling singer-songwriter who accidentally became the star of ‘Sexy Oklahoma!’ When I started hearing salacious rumours online about a New York production of the Rodger & Hammerstein classic nicknamed ‘Sexy Oklahoma!’, I knew I had to see it, seduced by the promise of a staging that would strip all the gingham kitsch and yeehawing jollity from this 1943 musical. I was raised on Golden Age movie musicals, but was disillusioned with their sanitised aesthetic, with the Technicolor sheen that the friends I attempted to convert had bristled at. Since then, director Daniel Fish’s massively hyped production has soared from New York's St Ann's Warehouse to Broadway, before being remounted (with some original cast in place) at London's Young Vic. A West End victory lap was inevitable. And I was chomping at the bit (to use an appropriately Western metaphor) to finally experience it.It turns out that when people say ‘Sexy Oklahoma!’, they really mean it. Not because this production’s full of rippling biceps or heaving bosoms – or even actual sex – but because it’s an edgy, rock ‘n’ roll depiction of a community whose only way to cut loose is by having sex or firing a gun. And they do plenty of both.With sex so firmly in the foreground, everything about this story shifts. In traditional productions, boy-crazy farm girl Ado Annie is pure comic relief. When she sings ‘I'm just a girl who can't say no!’, it's a straightforward excuse for some jolly old-ti