So how did a lush throwback like “People Will Say We’re in Love” become the sexy, stripped-down, countrified number being sung in the current revival and on its just-released cast album ?

[Why did it take so long for a full recording? The many-decades odyssey to get “Oklahoma!” right.]

Enter the production’s orchestrator and music supervisor, Daniel Kluger. He and the music director, Nathan Koci, along with a group of instrumentalists who have been with the project for years, sought to build a totally new sound world on the sturdy armature of Rodgers’s music.

“When one set of variables is fixed,” Mr. Kluger said, “others come into play.”

Here are four of those variables — or as Hammerstein almost put it, a list of do’s for you.

Instrumentation

The first musical difference you notice at Circle in the Square, where the revival is playing, is a visible one: The musicians aren’t in a pit but onstage with the actors, costumed as if for a hootenanny. There are also far fewer of them. Instead of the 28 players called for in Robert Russell Bennett’s original orchestrations — five woodwinds, seven brass, 13 strings, guitar, percussion and harp — there are now just seven, with no brass or woodwinds and only one violin, cello and bass.

The new instrumentation favors plucked and strummed sounds (like those made by banjo, mandolin and guitar) over smooth, legato sounds (like those made by clarinets, French horns and bowed violins). The overall effect is more like country music than operetta: dry and spare instead of sweet and smooth.

Listen to the opening notes of both versions of the song: four chords building to the first words of the introductory verse: