slowed, as though Curly is dreaming the thing. Laurey falls for
this too—she might even have her head on his shoulder at this
point. The song’s ending is marked by a gentle cadence to the
tonic in the orchestra just as Curly repeats the title of the tune.
Everyone knows that a song is ending. The gap between the
end of the song and the resumption of the book is filled with
applause. That cannot happen in Riggs’s scene and it cannot
fail to happen in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s scene. And while
the applause marks the divide, “Laurey starts slowly to emerge
from the enchantment of his description.” She has been capti-
vated again, and now she has to get back to her feistiness:
“On’y...on’y there aint no sich rig. You said you made the
whole thing up.” The seam is showing here. Hammerstein is
reverting to the exchange they had between the second and
third choruses, and back to the rest of Riggs’s dialogue, which is
followed through to her door-slamming exit. The musical un-
derscoring is over now. We are back in the order of book time.
A Dis-Integrated Number from Oklahoma!
Now let us glance at a number from Oklahoma!that is not well
integrated into the book. When Curly and Laurey finally get
on the same wavelength later in act 1, they sing “People Will
Say We’re in Love,” which moved out of the show and became
a standard popular song. It does not fit the plot very well. Lau-
rey sings “Don’t please my folks too much,” but she has no
folks in the book. Her parents are dead, and she and her aunt
are trying to run the farm together. That is a main point of
the plot, but the song contradicts it. “Sweetheart,” the Laurey
of the song calls Curly. Sweetheart? The Laurey in the book
would never call a cowboy “Sweetheart.” This song makes a
poor fit with plot and character, yet no one has ever com-
plained about the poor fit before. I am only pretending to
complain. Like everyone else, I am glad to hear this love duet
sung by two good singers in Oklahoma!It is high time they
sang together, these two. We have seen their musical selves be-
fore, in their solos. Now they are pretending not to be in love