Questions about the 1999 revival "Annie Get Your Gun"- Page 2

[Owen22]

Posted: 7/19/20 at 2:29pm

Reba was amazingly authentic where Bernadette was...well, Bernadette.

Had lost of problems with the new, mostly unnecessary book I remember...

[Dollypop]

Posted: 7/19/20 at 3:22pm

Enough with the "revising" of Broadway shows!

If a vintage show is being revived, it should be performed with the same text and score as it was originally. Perhaps a pre-show speech should be given to explain that the cast and staff realize that times have changed but the music and over-all production warrant a second viewing.

When I DO! I DO! was revived with Karen Ziemba and David Garrison, the revised lyric for "What is a Woman?" was lauhable.

[joevitus]

Posted: 7/19/20 at 4:40pm

It's odd to me that a show as fundamentally innocent as Annie Get Your Gun can be seen as "problematic." But it unquestionably is. This supposedly sexist show was suggested by a woman writer as a vehicle for a female star.

As a Gen Xer, not only had I grown up knowing it as a classic, but I'd performed as a kid in a kid's production  (were were all around 12 or 13) of this show, and none of the girls in the cast then were upset by the ending. Through my teens as a performer and even as an adult in my twenties when I was still in theater, I never heard any actresses complain about the show, or knew of female audience members being upset with it. And the revivals of the late nineties only focused on the problem with the representation of American Indians (the term I use because it's the self-referential term I most often hear used).

Yet sometime in my 30's, when I watched the movie with my two young nieces, they took the ending as pretty much a slap in the face. I'm pretty sure American Indians respond the same way to its depictions of indigenous people. Frankly, both of these things are odd to me. Annie is clearly the prize-winner, Sitting Bull is the smartest character in the show. I'm very well aware that I will strike a lot of people here as clueless on this subject. 

I don't know whether to call the show sexist and racist or to call Millennials cry-babies. It will be interesting to see if, twenty-forty years from now, the show once again becomes acceptable and a regularly revived classic, or if a sea-change has occurred and it is never coming back as a work with popular appeal.

[bk]

Posted: 7/19/20 at 5:06pm

The revival was terrible.  Peter Stone failed the original book.  By making it a "story" being told you never think you're watching an actual story but a story within a conceit and that doesn't work because you don't invest in the characters in the same way.  Bernadette was not at her finest, Wopat was charming.  A clever director would know exactly how to stage the "problematic" aspects, which really aren't problematic if you know what you're doing.  All that said, Reba, who did the show with Brent Barrett, was fantastic and so was he.  It didn't help the revisal itself, but it did make you love the two characters more.