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Annie Get Your Gun, Irving Berlin's rootin' tootin' family musical, takes the Goodspeed Opera House stage from April 16 to June 27. Shot through with some of the best Broadway songs ever, ("There's No Business Like Show Business, I Got Lost in His Arms, and Doin' What Comes Naturally,) it follows Annie Oakley, a backwoods spitfire, who can outshoot everyone. She falls for the handsome marksman, Frank Butler, and sparks fly faster than bullets as Annie and Frank's competition and romance heat up.
The show's character is startlingly close to the real Annie Oakley, born in 1860, except that she was from Ohio, not the wild, wild, west. Biographers describe the real Annie's sharp shooting as beginning at eight, when she shot game in the woods and sold it to local stores to help her impoverished family. As a young woman, she competed in a Cincinnati shooting contest, winning $100. Annie's competition, well-known marksman, Frank Butler, was stunned and smitten. Just as in "Annie Get Your Gun," Annie and Frank fell in love. In real life, they married and went on to perform together in Frank's stage show, with Annie miraculously shooting a cigarette out of her husband's lips. As Mark Twain put it, Annie Oakley could hit anything with a gun that anyone else could, and then some. Tickets for Goodspeed's "Annie Get Your Gun" are $64.50 and $70.50. For more information, visit Goodspeed's website.
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