Annie Get Your Gun

The plot resolution -- the heroine deliberately losing a contest for love of a man who won't have her any other way -- presents problems for our egalitarian society, but Irving Berlin's score for Annie Get Your Gun remains irresistible. And once the Drury Lane ensemble demonstrate that they can sell "No Business Like Show Business" as if it were written only yesterday, we have full confidence they can pull off the rest. And they do. Annie may take a fall to please her handsome rival, but her action is clearly presented, not as a humiliation of the proud by the puerile, but as a willing truce by two worthy contenders weary of counterproductive squabbling.

Anyway, Kelli Cramer's Annie, with her big fresh face and big gut-bucket voice, is so guilelessly charismatic, she can do no wrong. As the object of her attraction, Mark Brink has yummy blue eyes, an ear-soothing baritone (think Robert Goulet), and gets another chance to display the rope-spinning trick he learned for last year's Will Rogers Follies. But if Cramer is the spark and Brink the tinder, the fuel is composed of Roderick Allen and Robert G. Miller's ballyhootin' Bills (Buffalo and Pawnee, respectively), David Bonanno's nimble Charley, a quartet of scene-stealing children with enough sparkle to illuminate all Oakbrook, and especially Bob Romeo's avuncular Chief Sitting Bull, whose dignified underplaying renders the potentially embarrassing Sioux Initiation scene a disaster averted. Under the sure-shootin' direction of Ray Frewen and choreography of James Zager, Drury Lane hits the bullseye with this Gun.