- Performances: 1,045
- Theatre: Marquis, after a one-month out-of-town trial at the Kennedy Center.
- Open / Close: March 4, 1999 – September 1, 2001
- Tony Awards: Two, Best Revival of a Musical and Best Leading Actress in a Musical for Bernadette Peters. Also, a special Drama Desk Award for Reba McEntire in 2001.
- Box Office: $82M ($120M in 2020 dollars).
Podcast
Robyn O’Neill (pictured below) lends her first-hand knowledge of this classic show to the conversation. We have to do a little Wopat but spend more time on the Bernadette Peters of it all plus some Reba. And learn where exactly the term “shoot from the hip” comes from.
Now that’s an alliterative production!
(Photo by Eric Dobbs)
I’ve puzzled over what to say about this revival of “Annie Get Your Gun” (the second revival on this list) for over a week. I know there are people who love the original show, practically everyone knows the two most famous songs from the score (“There’s No Business Like Show Business” and “Anything You Can Do”), and we had a widely adored production here in Richmond in 2005. At the same time, there have been those who have dismissed “Annie” as “Irving Berlin’s grab bag of great show tunes.”
It’s impossible for me to make an informed judgement; sad to say, I’ve never seen the show. This is anomalous: I have seen most of Broadway’s long-runners in some form, whether in NYC, a local or regional production, YouTube clips or video footage, or, as a last resort, a movie adaptation.
With “Annie,” though, the readily-available movie is the famous Ethel Merman version. There are a paltry number of video clips of the Bernadette Peters variation and there are some major differences between the 1946 & 1999 productions. And in some of my reading, the changes made were not universally appreciated.
“There’s No Business Like
Show Business.”
Bloom & Vlastnik, the authors of the reference tome “Broadway Musicals: The 101 Greatest Shows of All Time” are not fans. They sniff that the playwright who polished the book, Peter Stone, “decided to make the show ‘politically correct,’ an unnecessary exercise in disembowelment that hurt the show greatly.” They also decry his decision to create a story within a story structure, which they call “the ultimate plot cliche.”
- Fascinating diversion: The Washington Post published a great story on the process of fine-tuning the production between the Kennedy Center run and Broadway. Fun reading!
It is also weird to me that, even though Peters won the Tony for her performance, the lasting legacy from the production seems to be the emergence of Reba McEntire as a viable actress. It is arguable that McEntire’s re-energization of the production pushed it past the 1,000 performance mark. The New York Times certainly thought so, calling McEntire’s star turn “without qualification the best performance by an actress in a musical comedy this season.”
- Fun McFacts: McEntire had played Annie Oakley already in 1995, appearing in “Buffalo Girls,” a TV miniseries that depicted the life of another famous cowgirl, Calamity Jane. McEntire had never seen “Annie Get Your Gun” before appearing in it.
I’ll have the opportunity to talk about “Annie” again before too long: the original production ran for 102 more performances than the revival and sits at #97 on the list. So what to say about this production? I’ve listened to the Grammy Award-winning cast album and it is great: Peters is a powerhouse as always and Wopat acquits himself just fine. Based on the few clips available, the choreography (originated by director Graciela Daniele but polished by Jeff Calhoun), adds quite a bit of flair and pizzazz.
- Fun Fact: Remember Jeff Calhoun? He was mentioned prominently in the first Countdown entry on this site as the director of “Newsies” and again as the director of a high-profile revival of “Big River.”
Still, the show seems a prime candidate for political incorrectness, with native American characters, competition based on classic gender roles, and maybe even some sticky urban/rural dynamics. That said, I would love to see a visionary director take on the show, drafting any number of kick-ass actors as the leads, maybe even including some racial diversity in the cast to really scramble the calculus.
It may be a pipe dream, though, given that even 20 years ago, the Washington Post was asking, “with its crude dramaturgy and insensitive racial attitudes, [is] ‘Annie’ fit for the ‘90s?” I’ll wait hopefully and, in the meantime, be satisfied with the sun in the morning and the moon at night. (Plus another 100+ long-running shows to write about…)
Final Grade: B+.
PS: Two clips that give a sense of the production, though the quality of the second is really not great. If there’s a high-quality rendering of this production, I couldn’t find it!