Shirley Jones Returns to “Oklahoma!” with Her Teen-Idol Son

The night before the Tony Awards, Shaun Cassidy and his mom, the star of the 1955 movie, took in the musical’s dark and sexy revival.

On a recent Saturday, at Bob’s Steak & Chop House at the Omni Berkshire Place, on East Fifty-second Street, Shaun Cassidy, the sixty-year-old performer, writer, and producer, ordered an Arnold Palmer “with more Arnold than Palmer.” He wore a crisp slate-blue suit, a pocket square, and a white shirt with the top buttons undone—a genteel update of his late-seventies look, when, as a teen heartthrob, he appeared on a popular poster wearing a revealing satin jacket. Beside him was a box of 3-D slides taken by his grandfather at the 1955 movie première of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Oklahoma!,” which stars Cassidy’s mother, Shirley Jones. Jones, then twenty-one, had ridden to the première with her parents, in a surrey with a fringe on top; on Saturday, at age eighty-five, she would ride to the Broadway revival’s matinée with her son, in a chauffeured S.U.V.—beginning at that hotel, where, in 1942, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein had first met to discuss writing “Oklahoma!” and had formed their musical partnership. Cassidy looked through a mid-century slide viewer that resembled binoculars. “This is the cast of the Broadway production of ‘Oklahoma!’ serenading her,” he said.

In the hotel lobby, Jones, who is petite, with short white hair, emerged from an elevator wearing a dark suit and a butterfly-shaped brooch. In the car, she said that, when she was cast as Laurey, she and the character had much in common. “I was raised in a small town,” she said. “I was in farmland a lot.” The car passed City Center, where Jones, at eighteen, had sung with a full orchestra for the first time. (She’d gone to an open audition and impressed Rodgers and Hammerstein’s casting director, who summoned Rodgers, who summoned Hammerstein; they quickly put her under contract. She went on to star in the movies of “Oklahoma!,” “Carousel,” and Meredith Willson’s “The Music Man.”) Laurey may be innocent, Jones said, but she’s smart: “She wasn’t just somebody who was being taken care of and couldn’t have her own opinions.” And Laurey’s beau, Curly? “He was my first love, I guess.” In the movie, Curly was Gordon MacRae—Cassidy’s godfather. “Gordon was my first leading man, and I adored him,” Jones said. Before they met, “I had all of his records next to my bed and I would play them every night.” Her second Curly, in a European tour of the show, was Jack Cassidy; singing “People Will Say We’re in Love,” they fell in love. They married and had three sons, and Jones became stepmother to David Cassidy, also a seventies teen heartthrob, who co-starred with Jones in “The Partridge Family.”

At Circle in the Square, Cassidy and Jones, arm in arm, made their way down the aisle beneath a riot of colored foil banners and took their seats, in the round, near a table topped with Crock-Pots. As the show began, Curly (Damon Daunno), guitar in hand, sauntered onstage, in chaps as high as an elephant’s eye. “There’s a bright golden haze on the meadow,” he sang. In this “Oklahoma!,” directed by Daniel Fish, Curly and Laurey (Rebecca Naomi Jones) have a spikier rapport than their Jones and MacRae incarnations. But as they began to sing “People Will Say We’re in Love,” with Curly sitting on a table and Laurey leaning toward him, the spikiness shifted into longing. “Why do the neighbors gossip all day behind their doors?” Daunno sang. Cassidy dabbed his eyes; Jones patted his knee.

Cassidy and Jones looked pleased as the show’s innovations unfurled: phallic corn shucking during “Many a New Day” (Jones mouthed the words), the cracking open of Bud Lights, Ali Stroker’s showstopping performance of “I Cain’t Say No,” in a feistily rolling wheelchair, her volcanic singing making Ado Annie’s lustiness sound righteous. (The next night, Stroker won a Tony—and “Oklahoma!” did, too.) At intermission, during the production’s famed serving of chili and cornbread, a stunt: for TV cameras, the straw-hat-wearing parents of the Tonys’ host, James Corden, brought Jones and Cassidy paper cups of chili. They ate it as Act II began and the room filled with thick, rolling stage fog, for the dream ballet.

“The tweet you posted last night struck a chord around the world, united all factions, and basically altered the course of humanity.”

After the show’s climax—blood, fiddling, injustice, “O-K-L-A-H-O-M-A!”—and a standing ovation, Aunt Eller (Mary Testa) wrangled the crowd. “You’ll want to tell your children and grandchildren about tonight,” she said. “We have with us a direct link to Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein. Please welcome back to Broadway Shirley Jones!” The crowd roared in wonder, then stood again, whooping like farmers and cowmen.

Backstage, Jones and Cassidy met the cast, everybody packed into Stroker’s dressing room. “I never heard the text before today,” Cassidy said. “It’s like the Coen brothers did a rewrite.” He compared the music with Hank Williams, Chris Isaak, Patsy Cline. Daunno and Rebecca Naomi Jones came in, after showering for stage-blood removal. “My mom, Shirley,” Cassidy said, making introductions.

Daunno, looking emotional, bent down and hugged Jones tight.

“So, so wonderful,” Jones said to him, warmly. “It came alive again, somehow, for me. I wasn’t sure that was going to happen, to tell you the truth. But it did. It sure did.” ♦