| Author | Message: AGYG Reviews | Posted by: StageTS
On: 3/5/1999 at 5:02:42 PM GMT
Message #: 844
See headers | Well, "Annie Get Your Gun" has officially opened and it seems to be a hit!!!!
I've read a bunch of reviews and all of them have said great things about
Bernadette. The review in Newsday was amazing! I don't think they said one
negative thing about it. I saw a review of the show on the 11 o'clock local
news (NBC) here that showed a bunch of clips from the show ("No Business Like
Show Business," "Lost In His Arms," "Sun In The Morning And The Moon At
Night," "Anything You Can Do," "My Defenses Are Down," "Who Do You Love - I
Hope" and "Doin' What Comes Naturally") and the reviewer overall thought it
was good.
NOW, the New York Times... Well, let's just say the New York Times review
didn't make me happy. I'm attaching it here so you can all read it... just to
warn you: it's really really negative. But don't get discouraged because
this is the only negative review I've seen. Right after the NY Times review
is the Newsday review which should cheer you all up!
Tim
New York Times:
'Annie Get Your Gun': Everything the Traffic Will Allow
By BEN BRANTLEY
NEW YORK -- Every so often, though not close to often enough, something
sharp and radiant pierces through the sticky, acrid muck that is being called
"Annie Get Your Gun." That something is starlight, and not surprisingly it
emanates from Bernadette Peters, who has taken on the title role in the
misconceived revival that opened Thursday night at the Marquis Theater.
Ms. Peters, as you probably know, is one of the few great performers under
70 who came of age in the American musical theater, and she still treats a
Broadway stage as if it were her first home. When she starts to sing in that
oversize little-girl voice, it feels like an invitation to walk straight into
her heart. Even the silliest seeming ditties can become affectingly sincere
confessions when delivered by Ms. Peters. She is an enduring and essential
reminder of the emotional vitality of a genre that in recent years has lost
its way.
When such a rare natural resource is squandered, it's hard not to get angry,
and the abuse of Ms. Peters in this tawdry take on Irving Berlin's most famous
musical is definitely cause for fuming. As staged by Graciela Daniele, from a
revision by Peter Stone of Herbert and Dorothy Fields' original book, this
"Annie Get Your Gun" takes the idea of hiding your light under a bushel to new
extremes. Misdirected and miscast in a role forever associated with its
originator, Ethel Merman, Ms. Peters still manages to give off flickers of her
special brand of magic. But almost everything around her is conspiring to
camouflage it.
This isn't one of those shows where you sit there open-mouthed wondering,
"What on earth were they thinking?" The intentions of the production's
creators are clear: to transform a period piece, with a quaint, creaky book
and a great score, into something acceptable to contemporary tastes. Yet in
pursuit of this goal, the show seems to be perpetually apologizing for itself,
keeping the corny, tuneful work at its center at a disdainful distance.
There's an implicit sneer in the exaggerated delivery of the jokes; in the
vulgar, catch-all choreography by Ms. Daniele and Jeff Calhoun; in the
uncharacteristically lurid sets and costumes by the Tony Walton and William
Ivey Long, respectively; even in the mumbling hillbilly drawl Ms. Peters has
affected. Presumably the idea was to create a colorful, celebratory fantasy of
what the American musical once was. The effect, however, is of a late show in
Las Vegas or Atlantic City, N.J., performed by a worn-out cast that is more
than ready to go home.
In Stone's revision, this story of performing sharpshooters in competition
and in love opens with pre-emptive self-consciousness. The musical's famous
anthem, "There's No Business Like Show Business," has been moved from the
middle of the first act to its very beginning, where it is sung a cappella in
ruminative, dreamy style by Tom Wopat, the evening's leading man.
A big-top tent is cranked up by Ron Holgate, the actor who plays Buffalo
Bill, whose Wild West show is the pivot of the musical. What we are about to
see, we are told, is a play within a play, and there is a firm suggestion that
we are not to take it too seriously.
What follows, however, immediately shatters any sense of gentle, nostalgic
reverie. The tale of the rustic Annie's rise to stardom as a markswoman and
her conflicting romantic pursuit of the dapper Frank Butler (Wopat), her
professional rival, is presented with both hard-pushing shrillness and a weary
lack of conviction, and the show seems both to pander to and patronize the
audience.
Stone has spoken in interviews of reshaping the script to eliminate any
cause for political embarrassment, especially in its portrayal of American
Indian characters and what might have been construed as antifeminist
sentiment. Yet what has been substituted somehow seems even more abrasive. It
is impossible, for example, not to flinch when one white man says admiringly
to another, after being bested by an Indian in a business deal, "How the hell
did we ever get this country away from them?"
In the same vein, the show now features a racist buffoon of a villain in
Dolly Tate (Valerie Wright), Frank's lovelorn assistant, who works hard to
thwart the romance between her younger sister, Winnie (Nicole Ruth Snelson),
and Tommy Keeler (Andrew Palermo), who is half Indian. (The egalitarian Annie,
on the other hand, aids the embattled lovers while observing, "Indians are
real fine folks.")
Dolly's prejudice apparently justifies her being the target of the show's
most mean-spirited jokes, which are built around the vanity of a sex-starved
woman and are themselves a study in misogyny. To say that the brittle Ms.
Wright does not redeem the role is simply to say that she fails to achieve the
impossible. And the desperation-edged, broad-stroke quality of her performance
is by no means unique to her.
The gravest casualty of this kind of caricature is, of course, Ms. Peters,
who for much of the performance speaks in a turgid, twangy accent that brings
to mind the inbred yokels of Erskine Caldwell. Her molasses-slow delivery
means you can anticipate Annie's threadbare punch lines long before she
reaches them. And the bruisable, fragile quality that has been such an asset
to her in other roles works against her here.
Merman could triumph as Annie, in both the original 1946 production and the
1966 revival, because her steamroller strength was irony-proof and prurience-
proof. In cast recordings you can hear the get-on-with-it determination in her
voice. She is utterly winning when she belts the lewd double-entendres in
"Doin' What Comes Natur'lly" because there's never a wink in her voice. And
there was clearly never any danger of her turning into the docile child wife
of Frank Butler's fantasies.
In this version, when Frank sings wistfully about "the girl that I marry" as
"a doll I can carry" and someone as "soft and pink as a nursery," he is in
fact describing Ms. Peters. There is an emotional delicacy to this Annie,
evident even beneath her soiled buckskins and mush-mouthed speech, that is
intermittently touching but way out of sync with the burlesque tone of the
rest of the show. And the sex jokes, especially the allusions to Annie's
breasts, make you squirm in ways they wouldn't have with the forthright
Merman.
Still, it is Ms. Peters who provides the show with its only genuine
pleasures, and they come when she sings. The orchestrations of Ms. Peters'
romantic numbers are joltingly different from any of the other songs, more
appropriate to a cabaret act or concert. They have the virtue, however, of
nicely setting off the shimmering layers of feeling Ms. Peters brings to
ballads like "Moonshine Lullaby" and "I Got Lost in His Arms." She seems to
pull us all into a collective embrace with a mere catch in her voice or a hint
of a tear, and there are moments when nothing seems to exist but the star, the
song and the audience.
Not for long. Ms. Daniele and Calhoun keep cluttering the stage with their
distracting, eclectic choreography, which ranges from pure carnival kootch
dancing to slow-motion undulations a la Fosse. Both choreographers borrow
tricks from their previous efforts: the daguerreotype silhouette effects Ms.
Daniele used in "Ragtime" and even a hoop dance that brings to mind Calhoun's
work on "Grease!," another unfortunate revival produced by Barry and Fran
Weissler.
Most often the dancers evoke the ensembles that shape themselves into
flattering frames for aging divas in nightclub acts. This is especially
bizarre when Frank sings "My Defenses Are Down," about having fallen for
Annie, while a chorus line of posturing cowboys seems to be tempting him to
consider other sexual alternatives.
Wopat, who is best known for the television series "The Dukes of Hazzard,"
is the only cast member to emerge unscarred. He has a pleasant singing voice
and an effortless, low-key presence that is in marked contrast to the other
performers, whose oddly disaffected eagerness suggests that some martinet is
waiting in the wings for them with a whip. There's little spark between Wopat
and Ms. Peters, but since almost nothing in the show connects to anything
else, this is not surprising.
Toward the middle of the second act, when Frank and Annie decide to get
married, he speaks complacently about her learning to honor and obey him. Ms.
Peters lowers her chin defiantly at this suggestion, and for the first time in
the evening, her eyes flash. In the number that follows, the delightful he-
says, she-says counterpoint "An Old-Fashioned Wedding," the actress seems to
shake off the shackles of her hokey accent and the tedious production to
become an unfettered, impish life force, full of both real feeling and gleeful
mischief.
It's a short-lived moment of catharsis, but it lasts just long enough to
remind you of how good a musical can make you feel. Few people can transmit
this sense of pleasure as well as Ms. Peters. It is painful to see such an
expert reduced to shooting blanks.
Newsday:
Peters' `Annie' Bags a Solid
By Linda Winer. STAFF WRITER
ANNIE GET YOUR GUN. Music and lyrics by Irving Berlin, book by Herbert
and Dorothy Fields revised by Peter Stone. Marquis Theatre, Broadway at
45th Street. Seen at Sunday's preview.
CALL HER THE Anti-Merm. Bernadette Peters is daring to stand up to the
blasting, belting echoes of Ethel Merman in "Annie Get Your Gun," which
opened last night in Graciela Daniele's classy, romantic, thoroughly
enchanting revival at the Marquis Theatre. And if those seem like
awfully delicate words to describe Irving Berlin's raucous Wild West
musical of 1946, the composer-lyricist's amazing score reminds us why,
every so often, there is no business like show business, indeed.
What an unexpectedly lovable idea this has turned out to be.
Everything and everyone - not just the thrilling and irrepressibly
easygoing Peters - are underplaying clear up to the rafters. Even the
big and cold Marquis seems almost intimate in Broadway's latest
resurrection, rearrangement and drastic rehabilitation of a treasure
believed to be unstageable in our times. Even the gunshots have been
transformed into poetic rhythm.
As you may have heard by now, Peter Stone was called in to hammer
the Herbert and Dorothy Fields book into more socially acceptable shape,
to take out the offensive stuff about silly Injuns and the most dated
stuff about strong girls faking weakness to get their men. Despite fears
of heavy-handed political correctness, dire reports from the Washington
tryout and seriously homely poster art, the fixes are sweetly ingenious
and the show's a dream.
Even before Peters clomps adorably out as the young backwoods Annie
Oakley, we relax in the hands of professionals who know exactly what
they want to do. The story has been given a smart new layer of distance
as a show-within-a-show, the competitive romance between sharpshooters
Annie and Frank Butler as told by the players of Buffalo Bill's Wild
West circus. Like "Chicago," which has the same producers, the scenes
are announced, there's an onstage orchestra and dancers are first seen
warming up in the wings. This time, the performers are putting on their
Stetsons in sensual slow motion (inventively co-choreographed by Daniele
and Jeff Calhoun). And, on Tony Walton's simple yet magical big-top set,
an old-time wheel gets cranked to raise the painted curtain.
Then Tom Wopat, of all pleasant surprises, ambles onstage to sing a
slow and wistful verse of "There's No Business . . . " as a clarinet
player oozes onto one knee at the molasses pace of a dream. Wopat -
best known from from "The Dukes of Hazzard" and as a replacement lure
for tourists in long-running Broadway shows - easily commands the
stage as Frank Butler, the marksman whose sense of himself is challenged
by the upstart girl from the sticks. Wopat's Frank is no dashing hero,
but has a definite lived-in, manly but sensitive big-lug quality that
works beautifully in the softer realism of the production. He's no
classic Broadway baritone, but he can sing.
The top of Peters' big buckskin-colored, cotton-candy hair comes
about up to Wopat's shoulder, a contrast that makes this Annie's
effortless marksmanship - markswomanship? - that much more
disarming. Peters, our most underutilized throwback to the era of
virtuosic musical-comedy stardom, brings the same rigorous precision,
wit and sense of discovery to this chestnut as she has brought to her
cherished edgy women of Stephen Sondheim.
At the start, her Annie is an untamed cartoon, a ragamuffin in
oversized suedes (gloriously comic and glamorous costumes by William
Ivey Long). She talks with an alarming accent that sounds as if her
tongue is too big for her mouth. Peters, with her period face and
modern timing, lets Annie grow up into a woman incapable of throwing
away a nothing little line or wasting a gesture. She seems to enjoy the
sensation of living in her skin and is generous about sharing heramusement.
Then there is the voice, with its combination of simple sweetness
and complex irony, not to mention the risky streak that picks an
operatic high note out of the air in "Anything You Can Do" (effectively
moved from the first act to the second). When she quietly reprises "You
Can't Get a Man With a Gun" at the end of the first act, it seems
unlikely that anyone who ever struggled between career and love could
find the dilemma dated.
The rest of the cast is worthy of her, which says a lot. This
includes Valerie Wright as a snippy, bigoted but somehow amusing Dolly;
Peter Marx as a breezily conflicted Charlie, the company manager; and
Ron Holgate as a still-formidable Buffalo Bill. Andrew Palermo and
Nicole Ruth Snelson are funny and lyrical as the secondary lovers (a
biracial subplot cut, along with the charming "Who Do You Love, I
Hope," in Mary Martin's 1957 TV version and Merman's 1966 revival).
Then there is Gregory Zaragoza, described in the program as a
genuine "Native American" (Pima) and genuinely winning in the
dramatically refocused role of Chief Sitting Bull. No longer the butt of
jokes, "S.B." is a mogul with knowing, but self-mocking references to
gambling casinos and "great white father's Indian giving."
For the record, "I'm an Indian Too" and Frank's "I'm a Bad, Bad
Man" are gone. In an evening that includes "Doin' What Comes
Natur'lly," "The Girl That I Marry," "They Say It's Wonderful," "Got the
Sun in the Morning" and (new in 1966) the contrapuntal "An Old Fashioned
Wedding," trust me, you won't miss a thing.
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