Annie Get Your Gun – Union Theatre

Mike Slavin Januanry 2008

The real theatrical moment this time happened inside my head: about 10 minutes into the second half (you don’t have “acts” for musicals, do you?). I couldn’t quite see how they were going to get to the Deadwood Stage from here. “The Deadwood Stage?” I hear you cry, “How did the ‘Deadwood Stage’ get into it?”

Well, exactly! How indeed? It’s the fault of Doris Day and Howard Keel: they were in both “Annie” and “Calamity Jane”, weren’t they? “Oh no they weren’t!”, I hear you cry again. No! Exactly! It was Barbara Hutton in “Annie”, wasn’t it? “Oh no it wasn’t! It was Betty Hutton.”

Yes, yes, I knew that. It was just that up to ten minutes into the second half, I’d forgotten it. Then it kind of crashed out of some deep recess in my brain, like a chunk of ice when you’re thawing the freezer.

So there it was. I got my Irving Berlin separated from my Sammy Fain and Paul Webster (I looked that up!). But how did the title song from “There’s No Business Like Show Business”, as belted out by the inimitable Ethel Merman, get into it? As it happens, it started there. But I had to look that up too.

So musical theatre can be educational. And a helpful “Oldies” brain exercise.

And, sort of, “intimate”, too. One of the attractions of going to this show was to find out how you got a musical into the Union. Well, like Mickey Rooney, they must have said “We could do it here! We could do it now!”. And, damn it, they did. Right in our faces. Sitting in the front row (hard to avoid the front row in the Union) my companion was momentarily subsumed into the production as the object of Frank Butler’s (I think) affection. While the cast switched smoothly from singing, dancing, and acting to puppeteering, scene-shifting, and even into the orchestra.

You don’t get that sort of fun up West.