A Bud Light was cracked open onstage, spraying the audience in section 410 (“The beer zone,” Tait said. “I’ve sat there.”). Gertie Cummings jumped onto a table to do a jig, grazing someone’s hand (“That was me once!”). The sheriff knocked a Wild Turkey whiskey bottle onto a table (“When I was there, they told me not to drink it.”).
Beyoncé has her BeyHive; “Star Trek,” its Trekkies; and the Yankees, their Bleacher Creatures. The cast of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Oklahoma!” has Tait, who has seen the show 55 times and counting.
After the first 10, the stage manager alerted the actors: superfan in the house.
“They look for my little head bobbing along to the music,” Tait said at a special post-show presentation on Oct. 16 marking her 50th viewing. “It’s like ‘Where’s Waldo?’ ”
At this musical, a superfan is easy to spot. Staged in the round at the Circle in the Square Theater, with the house lights mostly on, the show aims to bring the audience into the small, gossipy community depicted onstage.
The characters flirt with each other, then with the fans. The stars boogie over to chat with the band. During intermission, audience members are invited to make themselves at home with chili served from Crock-Pots onstage.
In other words, it’s a show with fewer barriers between audience and actors than most. It’s the story of a country stretching west, across borders and social divisions. Daniel Fish’s production, which won the Tony Award for best musical revival, seems to bend the rules of history, too, punctuating a turn-of-the-century tale with stark violence and a dreamlike contemporary dance.
Amid those threads of time and territory sits Tait, a 62-year-old origami instructor from the Upper West Side.
As a child in Hales Corners, Wisconsin, population 7,000, she was too shy to try out for musical theater but spent nights listening to her father’s Rodgers and Hammerstein records like “Carousel” and memorizing the lyrics.
When she moved to New York in 1997 so that her husband, David, could take a job as a manager at Zabar’s, she discovered that she could get discounted seats to musicals, often for less than $40 a ticket. For more popular productions, and when the lotteries fail, she’s been willing to pay full price. She’s seen “Hello, Dolly” 12 times, “Hadestown” 14 and “Ragtime” 22.
Many of her friends are people she met in ticket lines or at stage doors. She calls the “Oklahoma!” crowd her Oklahomies.
“Cats,” “Rent” and other Broadway shows have famously had their own devotees; a 2017 documentary explored the world of these “Repeat Attenders.” Daniel Wann, a sports psychologist who studies fandom, said identification with a community, like a team or TV series, tends to improve self-esteem and reduce loneliness. It provides many of the same anchors as religion.
“It’s got sacred places, sacred people,” Wann said. “It’s got rules you don’t challenge.”
Tait has assembled her own version of an “Oklahoma!” Bible: a set of index cards that track the tiny differences in dialogue and choreography at every viewing. After show 25, she wrote that Damon Daunno (Curly McLain) told her “when he looks out & sees me in the aud. he feels like he’s home!”
She hasn’t persuaded her own busy children, who are 31 and 28, to join her for a performance, but she said the cast has been so warm to her that they feel like family.
“It’s therapeutic,” Tait said. She waits eagerly at each show for familiar banjo notes or the start of a two-step: “It gives me something to look forward to.”
Tait returns the generosity by showering the cast with gifts. When the show moved from St. Ann’s Warehouse to Broadway last year, she made origami horses that read “happy trails.” She has distributed origami chicks, roosters for “a performance to crow about” and a paper bouquet for Ali Stroker’s Tony. (Her husband, with an inside line to the best of Zabar’s, sent baskets of babka backstage.)
Tait’s 50th “Oklahoma!” — “my 50th bowl of chili!” she said — was her husband’s first. He particularly enjoyed the romantic tension between the wisecracker Curly and the guarded Laurey Williams (Rebecca Naomi Jones). When they finally kissed, he cried.
At the show’s close, the actors presented Tait with a cookbook that included the show’s signature cornbread and a recipe for “The Tequila and the Lime Should Be Friends” margarita, which she plans to serve at a “box social” dinner party. After she received a standing ovation, the music director Nathan Koci bounded over to offer Tait a hug, a prop pistol dangling from his hand.
Mallory Portnoy, who plays Gertie Cummings, insisted in a backstage conversation that Tait could do the entire play as a one-woman act. Though Tait knows all the lyrics, she said she would never sing during the performance.
“It’s not a singalong,” she said. “I’m tempted but I know it’s not respectful.” The most irritated she’s been at “Oklahoma!” was when a tipsy woman in the audience sang throughout the show, even during the lyric-less modern dance sequence.
Still, every so often she can’t help but join in the show’s choreography. When Daunno’s Curly broke into the opening notes of “The Surrey With the Fringe On Top,” Tait pulled open her gingham sweater to reveal a T-shirt with the song’s lyrics: “Chicks and ducks and geese better scurry.”
Because, like all the cast’s well-rehearsed members, a superfan never misses her cue.
This article originally appeared in
.