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For orchestrator Daniel Kluger, reinventing this Rodgers and Hammerstein classic was all about uncovering what was already there.

When musicals are revived on Broadway—especially older musicals—a new orchestration has become almost par for the course. For producers watching ballooning budgets, it’s an easy place to cut costs, thanks to new technology that makes it possible reduce the amount of musicians without sacrificing that big Broadway sound.

Economic considerations were not, however, the inspiration when composer and musician Daniel Kluger was brought on board to pen new orchestrations for a completely re-imagined production of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II’s classic musical Oklahoma! at Bard College in 2015, a production that transferred to Off-Broadway’s St. Ann’s Warehouse in 2018 and opens next month on Broadway at the Circle in the Square Theatre.

“The jumping off point was ‘what would the musicians be at a pot luck?,’” remembers Kluger about director Daniel Fish’s initial concept.

Kluger was tasked with removing the tell-tale signs of the typical golden age Broadway sound from Robert Russell Bennett’s original orchestration, which mainly meant dispensing with instruments playing the melody underneath the singers and trading big sections of instruments for purposefully isolated single players.

“A lot of reductions try to get the biggest sound you can with whatever tools are available, but I’ve done things like take a line played by a group of woodwinds and make it plucked on a banjo so that it’s intentionally exposed.”

The result is a dramatically reduced group of musicians—Kluger has taken Bennett’s 28-piece orchestration down to just seven—that create a sound far more evocative of turn-of-the-century Oklahoma than of 1943 Broadway. Instruments like mandolin and steel guitar, not used in the original orchestration, add new colors even as Kluger reduces the total ensemble.

Both Kluger and Fish made their re-imagined production with the full support of the Rodgers & Hammerstein estate. For Rodgers & Hammerstein President and Chief Creative Officer Ted Chapin, this was about honoring the legacy started by the authors themselves. “Rodgers & Hammerstein took risks, and so should we,” Chapin writes in the production’s program note.

Luckily for Oklahoma! enthusiasts, re-imagining the experience of this classic musical did not mean changing its material for Fish or Kluger. Fish has left Hammerstein’s original script fully intact, and Kluger has left the score’s underlying musical architecture and arrangements in place even while changing the instrumentation.

“The counterpoint and the harmonic structure of those songs are what gives them their emotional and dramatic impact,” shares Kluger. “I see it sort of as a sweater that I don’t want to pull apart.”

In fact, as Kluger studied the score more closely, he gained new respect for Rodgers’ genius as a musical storyteller.

“There’s a tradition in musical theatre writing where you’re trying to, with chord changes, make the audience’s spine tingle at the exact right moment that connects you with the character. What’s amazing about Rodgers’ music is that it does that, but it’s really unassuming. He doesn’t hit you over the head when he’s doing something brilliant.”

“There’s a tradition in musical theatre writing where you’re trying to, with chord changes, make the audience’s spine tingle at the exact right