E-Mail This Article to a Friend OK! Oklahoma! comes to PBS BY IRIS FANGER

One good reason — and there are many — to tune into WGBH’s Great Performances telecast of the 1998 Royal National Theatre revival of Oklahoma! this Saturday evening is to check out the fuss over Hugh Jackman, who’s currently collecting rave reviews on Broadway in The Boy from Oz. Best known as Wolverine in X-Men and X2, the 6’3" Australian who came up from Down Under to make his British stage debut as Curly is a gun-totin’ matinee idol, an increasingly endangered breed in this era of anti-heroic musical comedies. Jackman boasts a flexible, clear-ringing voice and a macho manner of striding the stage, and he does his own dancing in the dream ballet that ends act one (Alfred Drake in the 1943 Broadway premiere and Gordon MacRae in the 1995 film had dancer stand-ins). When you hear him open the show with "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’," you know you’re in for a beautiful three hours of a 19th-century American day.

The other breakout performance is Shuler Hensley’s as Jud Fry, the creepy farmhand who lives down in the smokehouse on Laurey’s farm and has a wall full of photos of naked ladies. At the end, of course, Jud gets his deserts and Curly gets the girl; nonetheless, Hensley took Olivier and Tony Awards for the London production.

The women are less compelling. Josefina Gabrielle is a former member of the National Ballet of Portugal, so like Jackman, she does her own dancing (the Broadway premiere and the Hollywood film also used stand-ins for Laurey). She has a good enough voice, but she portrays Laurey as a bit of a tease and a brat who expects Curly to wait around until she’s ready to fall into his arms. There’s more true grit in her Aunt Eller, who’s played — and well danced — by Maureen Lipman with a broad Midwestern twang and the air of being in charge.

Another break with tradition is that Agnes de Mille’s legendary dances have been replaced with choreography by Susan Stroman, though Stroman sticks to de Mille’s structure, especially for the dream ballet. One big difference is that Stroman has turned "The Farmer and the Cowman" into the show’s major dance production. De Mille choreographed the song as well, but Stroman’s scheme is more gritty, athletic, and violent, in keeping with director Trevor Nunn’s darker vision of the milieu.

America was at war when the original production of Oklahoma! opened on Broadway. The patriotic fervor of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s invocation of life on the Western plains hit a responsive nerve: the show ran in New York for more than 2000 performances and spawned numerous road companies, the film, and countless revivals, including those at everyone’s high school. People sang the songs until rock and roll took over; de Mille’s narrative choreography made dream ballets the fashion in Broadway dance until Bob Fosse and Michael Bennett came to town.

The British revival strives for a simpler kind of storytelling. Anthony Lane distills the entire West into a setting of symbolic set pieces — a rustic cabin, a fence, a wagon — to suggest the wide sweep of the unpopulated land. It’s to the credit of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s score, the performances by Jackman and Hensley, and Nunn’s unsentimental viewpoint that this television production can hold your attention for three hours, despite an exasperating number of corny shots of the audience applauding after every song, an unnecessary reminder that what you’re seeing was shot live during an actual performance.

Oklahoma! airs as part of PBS’s Great Performances series this Saturday, November 22, from 7 to 10 p.m.