Full-skirted sass and saloon-bar swagger
You have to go some distance this Christmas to find a show that isn’t decked with holly or stuffed with fairies, and doesn’t feature a man in a dress. So stetsons off to Sheffield for heading to the plains of the American Midwest for their annual Christmas musical with this Irving Berlin classic.
Annie Get Your Gun, the 1946 Broadway spectacular based on the 19th-century sharpshooter Annie Oakley, is not a show to warm the hearts of feminists: after all, our heroine has to pretend to be not so good at shooting as celebrity marksman Frank Butler in order to win his heart and save the day for Buffalo Bill Cody’s struggling Wild West show, in which she and Butler star. Yet Anna-Jane Casey is so fabulous as the Oklahoma backwoods urchin who becomes a global superstar in Paul Foster’s exuberant, big-hearted production that the plot is a minor consideration.
Casey moves about the stage with such physical purpose, it’s as though she’s facing down a headwind. Her voice is an extraordinary thing – all hands-on-hips brawn in Doin’ What
Comes Natur’lly, and all tremulous, aching beauty in Moonshine Lullaby. She might transform into one of the “pink” ladies Frank says he prefers, but this Annie never lets you forget the wildcat claws beneath the satin gloves. And although her relationship with Ben Lewis’s feisty Frank has been softened by Paul Stone’s 1999 revised libretto, the two still generate an aggressive heat in the climactic Anything You
Can Do that lingers like cordite from a smoking gun.
Annie needs a big staging to work, and gets it here, with song-and-dance numbers that ooze full-skirted sass and saloon-bar swagger. Alistair David’s choreography pays superb attention to detail, from the flirty ballroom ballet of Who Do You Love to the Broadway razzmatazz of I’ve Got the Sun in the
Morning. And the score soars like one of Annie’s bullets – thankfully now without the racially dubious song
I’m An Indian Too. Elsewhere, Foster confronts racial politics head on, with a white businessman exposed for the racist he is. Mainly, though, he knows that Annie is a musical about the business of showbusiness – and in this glorious production, showbusiness is exactly what you get.
Until Jan 21. Tickets: 0114 249 6000; sheffieldtheatres.co.uk