Here’s something fun: Corner anyone who’s spent any time with Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Oklahoma!” — whether in a community theater production, high school spring musical or the national touring show that comes to Tempe’s Gammage Auditorium Wednesday night — and ask a simple question: What song from the score are you absolutely sick of?

The tour’s cast and crew are politic enough, but six months into their run even they will ’fess up.

“I still feel like I’m discovering things (in the music),” says Tom Lucca, who plays the tour’s brooding meanie Jud Fry. “But yeah, some things get a little old. ‘Oh, What a Beautiful Morning,’ it’s a beautiful song, but after hearing it eight shows a week ... ”

Even director Fred Hanson, who flies in to spot-check the show along the bus-and-truck tour, admits there’s at least one song he can do without.

“If I had to hear ‘Farmer and the Cowmen’ just one more time, that’d be fine,” he says, laughing. “It’s a pretty repetitive number.”

The touring show draws direct inspiration from the recent London and Tony-winning Broadway revivals by producer Cameron Mackintosh (of Andrew Lloyd Webber money) and director Trevor Nunn — productions that offered a more rootsy, back-to-
form version of the musical, with more attention paid to the characters instead of the grand opulence that most theater companies give to this spectacular war horse.

Consider Jud Fry. In “Oklahoma!,” he’s a looming, frightening hired hand who has designs on filly Laurey, whether she wants him or not. Typically, community and high school productions make him into a menacing mix of vaudeville villain and Lenny from “Of Mice and Men.” What the revival did was to look back at Lynn Riggs’ novel “Green Grow the Lilacs” and graft onto Jud a more sympathetic — or at least three-dimensional — storyline, an excuse for his dark side.

“As opposed to just being a bad, growly person,” Lucca, 34, says, “we’re trying to get across that it stems from his loneliness. He does kind of get shafted in the show.”

“It’s all there on the page,” Hanson says. “You hear him talk about his history, of not being comfortable with people, especially women, and getting things wrong time after time.”

The show’s costumes and sets, Lucca says, aren’t vibrant, they’re muted as in real life. The sets — scaled down from Andrew Lane’s turntabled Broadway original — “are gorgeous, but they’re not ostentatious,” Lucca says. The show’s dances, choreographed by Susan Stroman, give Agnes De Mille’s 1943 steps a more acrobatic spin.

But ultimately, the appeal of “Oklahoma!” comes down to its songs. “Surrey,” “People Will Say We’re in Love” and the exclamatory title song. They’ve permeated the landscape of popular culture and even if they can seem trite or overplayed to “Oklahoma!” regulars, director Hanson thinks there’s a new vitality in them that the tour is tapping into.

“I think there’s a generation, the youngest of the theatergoers, they don’t have as much ‘Oklahoma!’ knowledge as you’d think,” Hanson says. “I was in Buffalo and I overheard a girl in the lobby say, ‘Oh, that’s where those songs come from.’ I think that says something.”

Non-union Broadway tour draws some criticism
Actors’ Equity, the professional union for actors and stage managers, has been relatively quiet about the sprinkling of non-union tours that have stopped in the Valley during the 2003-
2004 season.

Shows like the upcoming “Oklahoma!” and recent “Starlight Express” at Gammage Auditorium and “Fosse” and “The Sound of Music” at the Orpheum Theatre haven’t drawn so much picketing or protest outside the theaters — typical when these shows come to towns — as much as polite letters to theater reporters from Equity suggesting that patrons are paying full price for less-than-full-talent shows.

At the core of Equity’s argument is that producers of non-union shows pay their actors sometimes half of what a unionized actor would get (Equity requires around $1,300 a week, it says, plus a union actor earns benefits and earns a per diem stipend) and oftentimes the performers in the non-
union shows lack much work experience out of school, though neither values are reflected in the show’s ticket prices.

“Designating a show that does not use Equity actors as ‘Broadway’ is misleading,” Equity Executive Director Alan Eisenberg wrote recently.

But those working on non-union tours say it’s the only way to make these shows feasible (read: profitable) on the road. For “Oklahoma!” director Fred Hanson, it made sense to pull young, non-union performers into his show.

“If you’re casting people who are 18 or 19, which is what we were doing, trying to stay age-appropriate for some of these roles, you’re casting in that (non-union) world,” Hanson says. “These kids coming out of the schools today, they have the tools. It’s not like you’re teaching them from scratch.”

Even critics of non-union shows have said that “Oklahoma!” is a high-quality production — and Broadway producer Cameron Mackintosh signed off approvingly on the tour, Hanson says — so the Equity affiliation has been less of an issue.

For actors like Tom Lucca, 34, who plays Jud Fry in “Oklahoma!,” Equity status is a goal to eventually reach, but for now he’s juggling his acting with a job as a hospital physical therapist. He’s on a leave of absence until the tour wraps up in August.

“It’s what I do to pay the bills, so I can pursue this dream,” he says.

He couldn’t maintain his Equity status and still work in his other job, he says.