Music takes center stage in 'Annie Get Your Gun'

Four-time Tony Award winner Peter Stone liberates the score from outdated stereotypes in the original book to make the musical more palatable for modern audiences.

By JOHN FLEMING

© St. Petersburg Times, published October 8, 2000

Peter Stone hates the word "revival" when it's applied to musical theater.

"It's an awful, awful word," says Stone, a playwright who has written the books for many musicals, including 1776, The Will Rogers Follies and Titanic. "A revival is something that's dead. People don't say they're going to see a revival of La Boheme at the Met, or a revival of Swan Lake at the ballet, or they're going to hear a revival of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony at the Philharmonic."

But people do say just that when they're going to see a new production of an old musical, such as Annie Get Your Gun, for which Stone wrote the revised book. With Marilu Henner as sharpshooter Annie Oakley, the tour arrives this week at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center.

Revivals have, in large part, ruled Broadway for some time. Hit new musicals have been few and far between, at least since Cats, Les Miserables, The Phantom of the Opera and Miss Saigon settled in for long runs in the 1980s.

Show Boat, Carousel, The King and I, Guys and Dolls, Kiss Me, Kate, Gypsy, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum -- just about all the golden oldies have been treated to big-ticket reinterpretations in recent years.

Annie Get Your Gun, a 1946 vehicle for Ethel Merman, was always a conspicuous omission in the revival roll call. Irving Berlin's score contains some of theater's best-loved songs, from There's No Business Like Show Business to Anything You Can Do, Doin' What Comes Naturally to I Got the Sun in the Mornin'.

The problem was the book, which was riddled with offensive stereotypes of American Indians, as well as a sexist plot in which Annie gives up her gun-totin' career to salve the delicate male ego of her rival and heartthrob, Frank Butler.

Enter Stone, a four-time Tony Award winner. More than 50 years earlier, Annie Get Your Gun was one of the first shows he had seen in New York when he arrived from his home state of California to attend Bard College. Now it was his job to make the musical's book, written by Herbert and Dorothy Fields, palatable for modern audiences.

"I thought that to make this book work would be the greatest gift the show could have," he says. "I wouldn't have done it if not to liberate the score from what was keeping it from being heard. The score was the reason for doing this show."

Stone performed radical surgery on the book, which was little more than a collection of corny jokes. Songs were dropped, the order of numbers was switched around, dialogue was rewritten.

"The show had to be restructured," he says. "There was a naivete to it that I thought was a little too simple for today's stage, so I created a show-within-a-show concept. This way, it's Buffalo Bill who is presenting the story of Annie Oakley, and those are all actors up there, members of his Wild West Show, doing it under his big top."

The biggest change was moving There's No Business Like Show Business from the middle of the first act to the very beginning of the show. It's sung a cappella by Baxter, played by Rex Smith on the tour, before turning into a boffo curtain raiser.

There was no way to fix the woeful stereotypes in a song such as I'm an Indian, Too ("Just like Battle Ax/Hatchet Face, Eagle Nose/Just like those Indians/I'm an Indian, too"), so it was cut.

"Strangely, a lot of people like that number, but I don't think it's a particularly noble number musically, much less textually," Stone says. "Also, it came at a terrible time in the show. Annie's just lost her man, and she stops to sing a comedy number. That's the way shows were done in the '20s and '30s, but you can't do that anymore."

Then there was the legacy of Merman, who is so closely associated in many people's minds with Annie Get Your Gun. It was her biggest hit on Broadway. Could any singer today fill her cowgirl boots?

"With Merman, she planted her feet at stage center and belted," Stone says. "It was a phenomenon and a force of nature, but it wasn't Annie Oakley particularly. She was a New York person with a New York accent, though she tried valiantly to sound like a mountain girl. But nobody cared. They wanted Merman, and they got Merman."

Bernadette Peters starred in the revival when it opened on Broadway in 1999. She played the role much differently.

"The three daughters of Berlin all said the same things when they saw the run-through with Bernadette for the first time," Stone says. "They said this is the first time we've seen Annie Oakley, not Merman. In other words, they saw the person, the vulnerability of her."

Annie Get Your Gun continues in New York, now with Cheryl Ladd in the lead and soon to be followed by Reba McEntire. The road production, which debuted in July, has been shortened by about 20 minutes, with two more songs dropped.

Henner, in Stone's view, plays Annie as more of "a rube" than Peters did, and the onetime star of TV's Taxi and Evening Shade agrees.

"I wanted to create somebody who didn't know anything about social appropriateness," Henner says. "She talks in people's faces. She can slap people on the back. She invades their personal space. I saw her as very physical, athletic, somebody who's had to survive in the woods, but when she dealt with people, she didn't know what was right and what was wrong. I'm sure I play her as much more of a backwoods character than Bernadette."

Theater preview

Annie Get Your Gun opens Tuesday and runs through Oct. 15 at Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center. Tickets: $19.50-$61.50. (813) 229-7827 or (800) 955-1045.

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