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IN REVIEW
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FULL POWER 100,000 WATTS 1,386 FT. ABOVE AVERAGE TERRAIN george streets, station manager charlie keys, sales manager
by BLAIR~£^4^asSOCIATES.nc.
Page 14 • December 9, 1957
ANNIE GET YOUR GUN
Eleven years ago the biggest hit on Broadway was a musical called Annie Get Your Gun. Its plot concerned the rise of Annie Oakley from a West Virginia hillbilly to the star of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, all because she was the best shot in the world, and her romantic mishaps until she realized "You Can't Get a Man with a Gun." Its score was written by Irving Berlin and contains some of the best show tunes ever written by him or anyone else. And, in the starring role of Annie, shouting those songs until they bounced off the theatre roof, was the incomparable Ethel Merman.
On Thanksgiving eve, Annie Get Your Gun brought its bounce to television. This two-hour telecast, with Mary Martin in the title role, should become the same kind of hardy annual as her Peter Pan, for it was just as wonderful, just as colorful and even more tuneful. In Peter Pan, Mary flew on wires. In Annie, she moved as speedily through the air, but on the back of a galloping horse running his heart out on a studio treadmill. Traces of her Peter Pan-isms could be seen in the early scenes of Annie, when as a rude child of the hills she gleefully outshot the glamorous show business man who had stolen her heart and then sadly tried to figure out why her skill drove him away. But for most of the time, Mary as Annie was the romantic creature Peter could never be.
John Raitt, as the proud hero, looked the part to a "t" and sang it even better, and his acting, if not in the same class with his singing, was more than adequate for the demands of this musical comedy. The supporting cast was all it should have been. Such skilled comics as Reta Shaw as the jealous Dolly and Zachary Charles as Chief Sitting Bull were better than their material much of the time. But in musical comedies it's the music that matters most and on this score Annie's was the greatest.
In transporting the play from the stage to tv, director Vincent J. Donehue was fully aware of the changes needed to retain the glamorous artificiality of the theatre even when the proscenium arch is cut from 40 feet to 21 inches.
The commercials were up to the program. Songs from the show, with lyrics changed to sell Pontiacs rather than romance, added a musical emphasis to the cars themselves (and there's no denying that color tv is the ideal medium for showing off a new automobile). Harpo Marx, Hans Conreid and Joan Crawford did the three Pepsi-Cola commercials, each suited to the special talents of its star.
Production costs: $600,000.
Sponsored by Pontiac Div. of General Motors Corp. through MacManus, John & Adams and the Pepsi-Cola Co. through Kenyon & Eckhardt on NBC-TV live, in color and black-and-white, Wed. Nov. 27, 8:30-10:30 p.m. EST.
Cast: Mary Martin, John Raitt, Reta Shaw, Donald Burr, Zachary Charles, William O'Neal, Stuart Hodes and others.
Executive producer: Richard Halladay: di
Broadcasting