"Kansas City" is a song from the musical Oklahoma!. The plot set-up for it is the return of cowboy Will Parker (played in the film by Gene Nelson) from an excursion to the city of the same name. He describes his experiences in song. The song describes the wonders of there and its entertainments (from the viewpoint of a country bumpkin), all reprising with the concept that the conditions (in 1906) represent the ultimate in progress, with little more expected.
For the 1955 motion picture, a few lyrics about a burlesque stripteaser had to undergo minor changes to pass film censorship. In the original Broadway musical, Will sings:
For the film, these were changed to:
Building
Kansas City - Gene Nelson as Will Parker shares why the big metropolis of Kansas City has swept him away, in the 1955 film of Rodgers & Hammerstein's OKLAHOMA!
The song includes the lyrics:
The tallest buildings there in 1906 (the era when the musical is set) were the 12-story New York Life Insurance Building and the newly built 17-story Commerce Trust Tower. A major seven-story building at the time was The Jones Store at 12th and Main which took up an entire block and was 500,000 square feet (46,000Â m2).
