Oklahoma! ! A second reference, and a direct reference to the musical this time. Apparently Sherlock’s parents weren’t linedancing in Oklahoma, they were linedancing in Oklahoma!. Weird, right? Why a reference to an American musical about cowboys in a British show about a detective? 

Just wait.

Let’s first take a look at what happens in the first act:

Sweet orphan farm maiden protagonist Laurey has two suitors: Curly, a hunky sweet-talkin’ cowboy who visits her farmhouse regularly to a cautiously positive reception from Laurey and bald-faced encouragement from spinster Aunt Eller; and Jud, the two women’s goonish hired farmhand who has a brutish, violent obsession with Laurey and a brutish, violent jealousy of Curly’s frequent visits.

In Act I, Laurey impulsively commits to going to the Box Social dance with the goonish farmhand in the process of playing hard-to-get with her will-they-won't-they dashing cowboy. She immediately gets the sense that she will regret this, but she's too scared of goony farmhand to back out on him and too stubborn to come crawling back to cowboy. Cowboy Curly is frustrated by this apparent indecision, and confronts Jud alone in an ominous scene that foreshadows their final, fatal clash. At the end of Act I, Laurey gets high on "smelling salts" (camphorated laudanum) that she bought from a peddler in order to understand what to do. A fifteen-minute dream ballet reveals a happy life with Curly that is ruined on her wedding day when Curly transforms into Jud, and the church transforms into a saloon full of can-can dancers. Dream-Curly returns to confront Dream-Jud and they fight, but as a tornado rages, Dream-Jud kills Dream-Curly and carries off Laurey. Laurey wakes, terrified, and doesn’t argue when Jud tells her what time he plans to pick her up for the party.

You can substitute Sherlock for Laurey, John for Curly, and Mary for Jud and recreate several key scenes and dynamics from Sherlock without too much stretch of the imagination. You can see Sherlock and John’s stubborn, teasing banter in Laurey and Curly from the first scene, as well as Mrs. Hudson’s blithe encouragement of their relationship; John’s “people will talk” line gets its own musical number in “People Will Say We’re In Love”; food-sex metaphor is fully integrated into the plot; Curly threatens Jud and proves his sharp-shooting ability by shooting through a knothole in a wooden post “the size of a dime”. The entirety of The Abominable Bride is a visual and structural homage to Oklahoma!’s fifteen-minute opium-induced dream ballet, but one that foreshadows an unambiguously happy ending rather than tragedy. Truly, just watch it -- you could easily rename the dream ballet The Abominable Groom.

This musical is a baffling but blatant muse for Sherlock, going all the way back to the very first episode. One explanation is that Sherlock is a fairy-tale romance, and what better way to demonstrate that than to follow the romantic arc of a golden age Broadway musical? 

But what makes even more sense (and is ultimately far more poignant) in explaining why Sherlock fits so well as Laurey and why Sherlock seems to borrow so much from Oklahoma! is that Laurey’s character was intended to be read subtextually as a gay man from the very first draft. 

"Green Grow The Lilacs is a very bleak play about homosexuality. Would you get that from Oklahoma!? I don't think so." - Stephen Sondheim 

Green Grow the Lilacs was first staged in 1931. A pseudo-musical play showcasing the folk songs and regional dialect of pre-statehood Oklahoma, it ran for its full contract of sixty-four shows and toured the states a bit afterwards. A modest success in terms of Depression-era theater. 

Rodgers and Hammerstein both independently discovered the show and wanted to adapt it into a full musical theater production with original music. Oklahoma! would be the very first collaboration for the legendary composer-librettist duo. The pair added their songs, preserved much of the original dialogue of the play, fleshed out the secondary romantic subplot, changed the tragic ending to an unambiguously happy one, and made themselves a hit. 

“I like the bridesmaids in purple--”

”Lilac.” 

(Can we now tally a third reference to Oklahoma! in Sherlock?)

Green Grow the Lilacs was originally written by Lynn Riggs, a closeted gay man who set his play in the Indian Territory (soon-to-become Oklahoma) town of Claremore where he grew up. Functionally an orphan, his mother Rose Ella “Eller” Lynn died when he was a baby and he spent significant time as a child with his Aunt Mary: a divorcee with eight children, mostly daughters, and the stated inspiration for the character of Aunt Eller. Though his stated inspiration for Laurey is one of these girl cousins he grew up with, it's clear that Laurey’s true role is as a self-insert of Riggs himself.

This makes the entire play snap immediately into focus. Why else is an orphan woman even considering the overtures of a consolation prize farmhand goon when her only apparent kin is virtually begging her to get hitched with her cowboy dreamboat true love? It’s what first struck me as so similar between Sherlock and Oklahoma!: there is NO NARRATIVE REASON why they shouldn’t get together in the very first scene! Curly invites Laurey to the dance, and then he pretends to have been joking when she deflects his invitation. Is this sounding familiar yet? Why else is she worried about people saying they’re in love? There’s no father with a shotgun to hide from, no factional violence keeping them apart. And yet she has to get high like a certain detective we know in order to make what should be the most obvious choice of her life.

It means that dirty, brutish Jud is suspicious because smooth-talking slick-dressed Curly always visiting their farmhouse without having any real business there. It means that Curly’s disinterest in Jud’s porn stash and Jud’s hostility in response suddenly feels ominous. It means that the implication that Jud killed and burned down the farmhouse of the last family he worked for because he caught the farmer’s daughter, whom he was sweet on, with another man in the hayloft was less to do with violent, murderous jealousy and more to do with violent, murderous bigotry.

It means that Aunt Eller, who throughout the musical miraculously interrupts and prevents the commission of at least three different subtextual hate crimes, is less a spinster aunt eager to marry off her orphan niece and more a champion and guardian of gay love. (She’s also a naked-lady-picture-lookin’, red-petticoat-wearin’ lesbian, but that’s an analysis for another time.) Glad we have our own Mrs. Hudson, not to mention another character literally named Ella, watching out for our boys. 

So, back to Sherlock. We’ve seen the dream ballet. We’ve started the second act. What comes next?

In Act II, the Box Social is in full swing, and the fundraising auction of food-basket-plus-a-lunch-date-with-the-woman-who-made it is about to begin. Laurey’s is the last basket to be auctioned, and Jud immediately outbids several lowball offers, determined to win her whatever the cost. Then Curly appears, and the two engage in a bidding war, with Jud bidding all the money he has in the world, requiring Curly to sell his saddle, his horse (effectively giving up his profession as a cowboy for love), and finally (and ominously) his gun to the crowd in order to top it. Once Curly wins, Laurey finally is able to tell Jud to get lost (he reacts poorly to this so she fires him as well), and Curly and Laurey become engaged to be married. 

They marry, but Jud haunts their celebration. On their wedding night, during the humiliating tradition of “shivaree” which involves a mob dragging the couple from their marriage bed to mercilessly heckle them while banging pots and pans, Laurey and Curly are standing atop a haybale receiving this dubious honor when Jud appears with a knife and lights the haybale on fire. Helping Laurey to safety first, Curly jumps from the flaming haybale directly onto Jud, causing Jud to be killed by his own knife. 

‘By his own knife.’ After an entire song in the first act where Curly suggests that Jud ought to hang himself while delivering a string of insults disguised as a eulogy? Right. Definitely an accident. 

(“It’s not possible for the victim to have done it!” We’ve been told?)

This is where the play and the musical diverge. In the original play as written, “Curly is arrested, but breaks jail and returns to Laurey. The marshal’s men follow, but the couple is permitted to consummate their marriage in privacy, with the understanding that Curly will be taken into custody in the morning.” (x) 

Theresa Helburn, the producer of the play and the person who first brought it to the attention of Richard Rodgers, wants assurance that Curly will be acquitted, but Riggs fights hard for his tragic queer-coding, so together they wrangle it into something more ambiguous for the final edit. 

But when Rodgers and Hammerstein get their hands on it, the ending becomes unambiguously, unrecognizably happy: Aunt Eller comforts Laurey about Curly’s implication in Jud’s death (is this sounding like a familiar theory yet????), and then she demands an impromptu kitchen table trial for Curly so that Curly and Laurey can still catch the train on time for their honeymoon. The federal marshall objects, but at Aunt Eller’s demand, the town’s judge rules Curly innocent. With the bang of a soup-ladle gavel, and Laurey and Curly ride off into the sunset.

The only thing left to fix is to give this happy ending to an actual gay couple.