After Beaufort Debut, SSTI Turns to ‘Oklahoma!’

And explores the meaning of community 

Tony Award-nominee Jenn Colella in rehearsal for SSTI’s Oklahoma

After opening its nineteenth season in a new venue, the Southeastern Summer Theatre Institute has not only arrived in Beaufort; it has hit its stride.

SSTI’s June production of the Elvis-filled musical All Shook Up proved to be an irresistible hit with audiences, welcoming both longtime supporters and new patrons just discovering what’s been called “the minor leagues of Broadway.” For an organization that spent years producing award-winning musicals at Hilton Head High School, the move to Beaufort High School came with understandable questions. Would audiences follow? Would Beaufort embrace the company? The answer has been clear.

From the nightly standing ovations to the welcome SSTI’s staff and students have received throughout town, the company has quickly found itself at home in Beaufort. Restaurants, coffee shops, and local businesses have all added new flavors for SSTI’s visiting troupe. For a company that assembles working professionals and student performers and technicians from more than 35 states and three countries, that local support matters. SSTI does not simply perform in a community for a few weekends. It lives there, eats there, works there, and becomes part of the city’s daily rhythm.

Now, as rehearsals begin for the second production of the season, the spotlight shifts to a musical where questions of community, belonging, and home are appropriately at the very heart of the story.

Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! opens July 26 at Beaufort High School, bringing one of the defining works of American musical theatre to the SSTI stage. For SSTI, the timing feels fitting. In a summer defined by a new home, Oklahoma! offers a story about people learning what it means to belong to one another, in a brand-new territory.

The production is being directed by Tony Award nominee and South Carolina native Jenn Colella, who is making her SSTI directorial debut after many summers teaching with the program. While Colella’s Broadway career and Lowcountry roots bring a meaningful personal layer to the

Colella and longtime SSTI Musical Director Andrew Austin in rehearsal on campus.

production, her focus in the rehearsal room is not simply to create a nostalgic production of this classic show. She is asking the company to look beyond the familiar title and famous songs, and to examine the people inside the story with curiosity.

“This show isn’t about a good guy and a bad guy,” Colella told the company at the start of the process. “I think Curly represents promise and what everyone thinks someone should be. I think Jud represents loneliness and the parts of us that sometimes we’re scared to look at as individuals and as a community. I’m interested in the choices people make, the judgments communities form, and the ways outsiders are created.”

That idea runs through Oklahoma! itself. The musical is filled with iconic images and beloved songs, from “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” to “People Will Say We’re in Love” and “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top.” But beneath its bright melodies is a story about a community deciding its identity; who does that include, and who is left outside?

This production will bring that world to life on the grand scale that SSTI audiences have come to expect. Set inside a giant barn, the stage is filled with 10,000 stalks of artificial wheat and made complete with a real surrey with the fringe on top. For founder and director Ben Wolfe, that detail is central to SSTI’s work. The company’s productions are designed to offer audiences the scale and polish of professional theatre while giving young artists a rehearsal process led by Broadway performers, top educators, and working theatre professionals.

But for all its musicality and visual grandeur, Oklahoma! ultimately comes back to something deeply human: the delicate process by which a group of people becomes a community. That question gives the production a timely resonance during SSTI’s first summer in Beaufort, where the company has not only brought theatre into a new venue, but also begun building relationships throughout the city.

Onstage, Oklahoma! asks what it means for a group of people to become a community.

In Beaufort this summer, SSTI is gratefully finding a new community of its own.

Oklahoma! opens July 26 at Beaufort High School, 84 Sea Island Parkway. Tickets and performance information are available at SummerMusicals.com or by calling 866-749-2228.