John Doyle is as original a director of musicals as you will find on either side of the Atlantic. He has pioneered productions in which performers double as instrumentalists, playing brass, strings, whatever on the stage. He won successive Tony awards for his Broadway revivals of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd and Company. And as soon as you enter the Chichester Festival Theatre stalls to see scenery that consists only of two huge sails, watch an actor throw apples down the stage, hear Oh What a Beautiful Mornin waft in from offstage, then see cowboy Curly lead in a parade of performers bearing chairs, crates and tubs — well, you know you’re about to see a very different show from the deftly realistic Oklahoma! that Trevor Nunn staged at the National a decade ago.

Different but, sadly, far from better. Rodgers and Hammerstein’s songs remain wonderful, but (say) the repressed longings of People Will Say We’re in Love become less rather than more touching when Michael Xavier’s pleasant but bland Curly is sitting on a swing and the object of his affections, Leila Benn Harris’s sweet but vocally fragile Laurey, is circling him holding a chair. This is a very stylised, overdrilled production, no friend of intimate moments or quiet depth of emotion.

There’s clever use of shadow and light, especially when Craige Els’s Jud Fry, whose love for Laurey has morphed into stalking, comes to darken things. He’s the show’s big success: sweaty, matted, obsessed, dangerous.

But his angry inwardness serves only to emphasise how external much of the production is. At times the actors pose like waxworks in their dungarees and aprons. At others they bang about with those bloody chairs, or sprinkle red petals without reason, or move in artificial patterns. Why must Michael Rouse’s affable Will Parker signal his feelings for Natalie Casey’s impish Ado Annie by turning cartwheels? Why must the dead Jud be accompanied by girls in parasols as he’s shunted offstage — and then reappear, alive, to sprinkle more apples on the stage?

Search me or, rather, search Doyle for symbolism. Moreover, Laurey’s dream ballet isn’t the imaginative marvel Susan Stroman proved at the National it could be. Yet when the cast finally burst into the great chorus that gives the show its title, it was hard not to feel a leap of excitement. Oh what a so-so evening, perhaps. But those tunes remain irresistible.

Box office: 01243 781312, to Aug 29

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