One of the songs in Irving Berlin's delightful score to Annie Get Your Gun states, "anything you can do, I can do better," and that adage has never been more pertinent to this show's surprising longevity on Broadway. The unflappable lead character, Annie Oakley, has been played by Ethel Merman, Debbie Reynolds, Bernadette Peters, and most recently to reportedly wondrous effect by C&W superstar Reba McEntire.
These are tough shoes to fill for anyone, and the new Annie, Wings stalwart Crystal Bernard is far from a disappointment doing it. She hasn't completely shed her TV sitcom roots, but that actually works in favor for a show packed with corny one-liners. Bernard lacks stage presence (she is surprisingly diminutive in person and often seems swallowed up in the large Marquis Theater stage), but she gives it a rootin-tootin' go, and for a show as fundamentally flawed as this one, it's an honorable step.
Thankfully, the commanding, charming Tom Wopat has rejoined the show as Annie's love interest, Frank Butler, and his ease on the stage remains fetching. But the show still seems like it was produced in 1920 and time-warped into today. Some choreography is especially stale (and I suspect this is because of co-choreographer Jeff Calhoun, who also botched the execrable recent revival of Grease!), and the usually proficient behind-the-scenes team seems to have had a collective off-day with this one. William Ivey Long's costumes are pallid, Beverly Emmons' lighting design is unimaginative and dreary, and Tony Walton's set makes almost no impression on the viewer, and contains the single worst idea of 20th century theater: the rotating disc that moves whenever the music builds and you're supposed to clap.
But the material is still so witty, and its showmanship still works, even when the staging leaves much to be desired. Director-choreographer Graciela Daniele works in too stately a mode for the highs of this show, but that old-fashioned demeanor is far preferable to the ill-advised "modernization" of some other revivals that forget what everyone liked about them in the first place.
