Annie Get Your Gun Play Critique

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On Friday, September 22nd, I saw a performance of a revival of Annie Get Your Gun at Westchester Broadway Theatre. This musical takes place in an early 1900s setting in the Wild West, and involves a girl, Annie Oakley, and man, Frank Butler. Frank is the best sharpshooter for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, and Annie takes him up on a challenge and beats him. The play features a look into the lives of these two amazing sharpshooters, and their rocky love story. The story is of two very real people who lived long ago, and was fictionalized for the stage. The music and lyrics were originally written by Irving Berlin, and the book was written by Dorothy and Herbert Fields. The use of dance in this revival was very important to the course of the story. There were many large dance numbers, and deemed to be the highlight of the show. In the theatre’s Golden Age, sets were very elegant and extravagant and frequently included large casts, which this revival did as well. At some points during the show, there were dance numbers that lasted more than five minutes. The revival did leave out some songs that were in the original production which I personally would have liked to have seen, but in my opinion, the exceptional dance numbers did make up for it. …show more content…

This play was one of Irving Berlin’s greatest achievements, and was his only musical to initially run more than one thousand performances (Lubbock). Many believe, such as Mark Lubbock, that “The score is his best and most varied for the theatre, yielding as it does at least half a dozen substantial song hits” (Lubbock). Many songs from this musical are still well known today by many, even if they do not know what the musical is about. Berlin’s lyrics were “brilliant and inventive”, as Lubbock states in his book. Though Irving Berlin’s lyrics are seemingly genius, as they are still used today, there are other aspects of the play that make it a

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