What Comes Natur'lly

By Richard Zoglin

Even though she started in show business at age 3 1/2 (as a pint-size contestant on a TV game show called Juvenile Jury) and grew up to be the pre-eminent musical-theater star of our day, Bernadette Peters had never seen Annie Get Your Gun. So when she was offered the starring role in a revival of Irving Berlin's 1946 classic, she was not interested in nostalgia. "I don't think a show should be a walk down memory lane--that's why I've avoided revivals," she says. "I believe a show should happen in front of you for the first time."

The musical about sharpshooter Annie Oakley and her love affair with Frank Butler as they toured in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show has a long and illustrious memory lane, dominated by the legendary Ethel Merman. But the production that opened on Broadway last week--with Peters returning to the stage for the first time since The Goodbye Girl in 1993--takes a new bead on the familiar old target and hits the bull's-eye with ease.

Annie Get Your Gun has never had the emotional durability of the Rodgers and Hammerstein classics, or the cachet for sophisticates of the early Gershwin or Porter musicals. What's more, the show today sets off political-correctness alarms with its stereotypical portrayal of Indians. But the book has been updated by Peter Stone (Titanic) in ways that pass p.c. muster without losing all the fun. A song has been dropped (I'm an Indian Too); an interracial love story has been added; and the Native Americans in Buffalo Bill's show are now quite obviously playing along with the gag. ("How," says Chief Sitting Bull, by way of greeting, "...is business?") In a musical that proclaims, "There's no people like show people," why not?

Director and co-choreographer Graciela Daniele (Ragtime) creates a pretty, pastel production and fills the stage with inventive, witty movement. The members of the Wild West troupe are onstage most of the time, either dancing up a storm or providing rhythmic accompaniment to the action by slapping thighs or snapping scarves. When Frank (the fine Tom Wopat) sings My Defenses Are Down, he clings to the leg of one member of a male chorus line as they drag him across the stage--then he turns and drags them.

But the most revivifying part of the show is Peters, who gives the brassy Merman role an adorable new twist. At the start she lays on the backwoods accent so thick you have to laugh, yet when she pines and pouts for Frank, she gives the character a funny, foot-stamping girlishness. There are some miscalculations. The device of framing the story as a show within a show--introduced by Buffalo Bill--gains nothing, and opening with the big number There's No Business Like Show Business is a needless appetizer. It's not as if Berlin's matchless songs--Doin' What Comes Natur'lly, Lost in His Arms, on and on--don't start pouring forth soon enough. Or that Peters, in wonderful voice, doesn't treat each one like fresh-baked goods and make Annie Get Your Gun a brand-new delight.

--By Richard Zoglin