Annie Get Your Gun – Lincoln Center Revival 1966
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Synopsis
A musical about sharpshooter Annie Oakely is a natural for success on Broadway and throughout the United States where Annie and Buffalo Bill and Wild West shows appeal to the imagination. That Annie Get Your Gun became a success in England and France, Austria and Australia, Southern Rhodesia and Venezuela is a tribute to the remarkable skill of its creators, Herbert and Dorothy Fields, its original producers, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, and Irving Berlin, whose music and lyrics “lose nothing in the translation.” When Colonel Buffalo Bill discovers Annie Oakley, a sharpshooter who doesn’t realize just how “sharp” she is, he makes her part of his own famous Wild West Show. Already the star of the show is tall, handsome Frank Butler, who’s a hero to all the local girls and who is very unimpressed with Annie, both personally and professionally. Annie, much more adept at hitting the bull’s-eye than capturing a man’s heart, sets out to make Frank notice her by performing fantastic feats of shooting skill. She wins the star role in Buffalo Bill’s show but loses Frank, whose male vanity she has succeeded in wounding, when he leaves to headline Pawnee Bill’s rival show. The Buffalo Bill show goes to Europe, with Annie a star yet a very discontented woman, but, as always happens in happy stories, Frank also misses Annie, and ultimately love is the winner. The finale finds the two sharpshooters and the two Wild West shows merging and proving once again that There’s No Business Like Show Business.
Credits
Charlie Davenport: Jerry Orbach Dolly Tate: Benay Venuta Frank Butler: Bruce Yarnell Annie Oakley: Ethel Merman Foster Wilson: Ronn Carroll Children: Little Jake, David Manning Nellie: Donna Conforti Jessie: Jeanne Tanzy Minnie: Holly Sherwood Col. William F. (Buffalo Bill) Cody: Rufus Smith Conductor: Jim Lynn Porter: Beno Foster Waiter: David Forssen and Bobbi Baird, Diana Banks, Harry Bellaver, Lynn Carroll, Tony Catanzaro, Jack Dabdoub, John Dorrin, Mary Falconer, Patricia Hall, Walt Hunter, Gary Jendell, Ben Laney, Brynar Mehl, Deanna Melody, Kuniko Narai, Marc Rowan, Eva Marie Sage, Jeffrey Scott, Grant Spradling. Musical Director: Franz Allers Orchestrations by Robert Russell Bennett