Annie Get Your Gun

Bursting with technicolour sass and goodness, with a marvellous book that jumps off the stage from Irving Berlin packed with classics like ‘There’s No Business Like Showbusiness’ and ‘Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better’, Annie Get Your Gun brings a delightfully joyfully choreographed MGM-style musical extravaganza to the Theatre Royal Brighton’s stage. The whole cast were a treat for the senses, and Natalie Day, surprisingly the understudy, shone with the brightness of a young sun as the accidental feminist pioneer. Staged with the orchestra in full view, with everything framed within the Big Top performance area, the intimacy of everyone sharing the stage piqued the sense of theatre-folk camaraderie and showed off the ensemble’s skills admirably. Jason Donovan’s Frank Butler was frankly a bewildering love interest, with his pompous chauvinism, but Donovan found Frank’s more tender side when he could and strutted well, with a final macho tenderness that helped some way to explain the devotion Annie felt.

All in all, an absolute treat for the senses from start to finish, conjuring up and manifesting the first magical imaginings of musicals seen on rainy afternoons, made real.

Theatre Royal Brighton, 27 August 2014

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