steve's notebook

(Aug. 18, 2010)

I’ve never been the biggest fan of Annie Get Your Gun.   It’s engrained in my mind to some degree, as classics are: Merman being irrepressibly Mermanesque (I imagine grace notes in every phrase), the Betty Hutton-Howard Keel movie (faintly, lost somewhere in the childhood room), bits of the Mary Martin television version (no clearer than the kinoscope), Bernadette Peters affecting a ridiculous cartoon-hick-still-somehow-by-way-of-Queens accent.  Good score, pleasant enough, but such a corny show.  All that hillbilly old-timey-ness.  After last weekend’s semi-staged concert production at the Ravinia Festival, I have to say it’s not as bad a I remembered, but yet so much worse.

 The role of Annie Oakley seemed like an inevitable one for LuPone, with her campaign for the Merman mantle in Anything Goes and Gypsy, and having added the role to her repertoire in a 1998 concert version with Peter Gallagher.  It’s taken as a general assumption that she wanted the revival that eventually went to Peters.  She’d even recorded a few of the songs on her Irving Berlin album, Heatwave.  So it was surprising that, contrary to my expectations, the role was not a natural fit.

Now, obviously LuPone’s 61 years put her well past a reasonable range for the character and she’d be crazy (she might be!) to approach it anywhere outside of a concert setting. At least this was the Granny Get Your Gun version of the show that old Merman revived in 1965.  But the issue was primarily musical.  Her voice has changed. I noticed this a bit last summer in the Kurt Weill concert, but this score made the changes even more evident.  Since Evita, her reputation was as a belter—a good part of the reason for the Merman mantle.  But some combination of age and technique has moved the center of her voice into a headier mix.  The belt is still there in her deeper chest notes, but most of what she sings falls into this new area, which doesn’t serve the typically Merman-esque “You Can’t Get a Man With a Gun” and “Anything You Can Do” particularly well.  It does, however, make the lyrical songs her standouts.  “They Say It’s Wonderful” and “I Got Lost In His Arms” were terrific.  If she keeps working her voice in this direction, it could open a new range of roles to her.  Maybe she could do the Helen Traubel part if Encores! ever talks the Steinbeck estate into Pipe Dream.  Or the sister in Most Happy Fella.

Patrick Cassidy, too, had prior experience with his role, playing a stint in the Weissler revival.  But his distinctly tenor timbre is more suited to Charlie Davenport than the “Bad, Bad Man” Frank Butler.  It was hard not to think how much more commanding the originally-announced Brian Stokes Mitchell would have been.  Cassidy, however, did make a convincing argument for “My Defenses Are Down,” which I’d always dismissed.  In general, I have to admit the score is a notch better than I’d remembered it.  Even if Paul Gemignani’s tempi continue to be far too fast.

The show, however, is so much, much more offensive.  Its presentation of American Indians has been acknowledged as problematic at least as far back as the Weissler revival.  Peter Stone heavily revised the book for that production, softening some of the worse Sitting Bull moments and cutting the jaw-droppingly awful “I’m an Indian Too.” It still didn’t solve much.  The 1966 version presented at Ravinia was mid-century casual racism in all its glory.  Injuns running wild destroying train staterooms and playing sidekick to White Man.  At least they cut the song, sparing us Patti’s exposition that “just like Battle-Axe, Hatchet Face, Eagle Nose” she’s an Indian, too.

And if that weren’t bad enough on its own (it is), Annie Get Your Gun has the sexual politics of a Viking attack.  It’s up there with Carousel (love him hard enough and you won’t feel it when he hits you) and Grease (slut it up and he’ll want you) on the list of musicals with terrible life lessons.  Even Sweeney Todd has a healthier morality.  Annie and Frank’s inevitable romance is continually scuttled throughout the show by his wounded pride at being bested in sharp shooting by a girl. Things are dandy when she’s his assistant, but as soon as she’s successful as him, he can’t deal and splits.  He claims to still be in love with her, but when they reunite in the second act, it’s back to the same insecure masculinity.  Frank’s introductory songs tell us two things: he’s a bad, bad womanizer who you really can’t take anywhere, and he only goes for pink and perfumed girly girls.  That’s fine; it’s not like we haven’t met men in need of a little reforming before.  Sky Masterson.  Harold Hill. 

The problem is the solution.  In their final shoot out to determine which is the champion, Annie realizes she’ll never win Frank so long as she wins the match, so she throws the competition, throwing away in the process her success to get her man (and of course Sitting Bull gives her the idea!).  It’s like a Kiss Me Kate in which “I Am Ashamed That Women Are So Simple” is played straight.  It’s okay you’ve tossed away your pride so long as you get to marry happily ever after.  Yikes.

Yet, unlike the show’s issue with Indians, there’s possibly a way to mitigate this one.  It would take a more skilled director than Lonny Price and probably some tweaking to the book, but if you could somehow tone down the gender politics of the relationship, it’s also the story of Annie being too focused (or, less kindly, self-involved) to notice Frank’s disappointment with being knocked out of the top spot, and his wounded ego not letting him celebrate her achievement.  But there’s still that ending.

In some way, the musical performances exacerbated this problem.  The traditional casting for these parts are a loud belter and a rich baritone.  With Patti landing primarily her lyric songs and Cassidy on the lighter side, it was easy to lose track of the clash of the characters’ strong personalities and let the focus fall instead to the social assumptions behind their behavior.

Problematic as it was, the evening was a lot of fun.  And it’s always rewarding to find out how much better a score is than you remember it.  There’s much that’s good and worth preserving in these older shows.  But when working with them, there must be a certain responsibility to interrogate the work’s assumptions, the baggage it carries with it and how it approaches the context in which it was written, and be as mindful as possible of how thorny they can be in the present.  Cutting a not-very-good-to-begin-with song is a step, but any approach has to take a critical eye to the piece as a whole.