Australia

Beth Dean as the Riding Mistress and the Ballet Ensemble in the JCW production of Annie Get Your Gun, 1950, Act I, Scene 3, Fairgrounds. National Library of Australia, Canberra.

Long before the release of the MGM film, Annie hit Australia, the first modern post war American musical to be staged here. In the light of subsequent events, it’s hard to believe that E.J. Tait, the venerable director of the giant J.C. Williamson production organisation, thought that the leading role should go to Gladys Moncrieff. Then 55, ‘Our Glad’ had endeared herself to audiences in amiable operettas like The Maid of the Mountains, Katinka and The Merry Widow. When she saw Annie in New York with E.J. Tait, he said to her, ‘You could play this, Gladys.’ Fortunately Miss Moncrieff disagreed—in fact she had her eye on a leading role in Song of Norway—and it was left to Tait’s fellow directors in Australia to audition and select a lead. At first it looked as if it would go to Jenny Howard, an irrepressible English comic, singer and panto Principal Boy, and a great Tivoli Circuit stalwart. Jenny lost out, however, to the ‘Californian Songbird,’ the ebullient Evie Hayes. Married to American vaudeville veteran Will Mahoney, Evie, too, was a favourite at the Tivoli, and at the Cremorne Theatre in Brisbane, which Mahoney managed. It was perfect casting.

The director and the leading man were brought from America. Director Carl Randall had a long list of Broadway choreographic and performing credits, including supervising the dance elements of Berlin’s 1940 musical Louisiana Purchase, but this was to be his first directorial assignment. The only Broadway credit of baritone Webb Tilton, our first Frank Butler, was a small role in Kern’s ill-fated Very Warm for May. Local recruits included familiar players like Marie La Varre, Claude Flemming and Sydney Wheeler, while among the company’s younger members were Victor Carell, Beth Dean, David H. McIlwraith, Richard Bradshaw, Robert Harvey, Irene Bevans and Graeme Bent.

Evie Hayes as Annie Oakley, 1950. Photo by Hal Williamson.

National Library of Australia, Canberra

Earl Covert as Frank Butler, 1949

National Library of Australia, Canberra

Annie Get Your Gun opened at His Majesty’s in Melbourne on 19 July 1947. An instant and emphatic hit, it spread joy throughout Australia and New Zealand until May 1953—a record run of 1238 joyous performances. Like Ethel Merman, Evie was unstoppable. The show provided her with the greatest success in her long career and earned her a secure place in the hearts of audiences and in Australian theatrical history. Years later she would delight in boasting that she ‘wore out’ three leading men—Tilton, Earl Covert, who had starred with Mary Martin in the 1947 US road company, and Hayes Gordon, who’d come to Australia as the male lead in Williamson’s production of Kiss Me, Kate. Happily, she didn’t ‘wear out’ director Carl Randall. He remained in Australia and worked on a diverse range of local productions from pantomime and revue to grand opera and ballet.

Act I, Scene 1, Outside Wilson House

National Library of Australia, Canberra

Act 1, Scene 3, Fairgrounds

National Library of Australia, Canberra

Inevitably, recapturing that initial Annie triumph proved impossible. Ten years after Evie’s last Annie, Williamson’s joined with Kenn Brodziak’s Aztec Services and the Tivoli to mount a new production. After opening in New Zealand it limped through four lacklustre weeks at Her Majesty’s in Sydney. The main problem was the casting of Anne Hart (Mrs. Ronnie Corbett) as Annie. She was, to put it tactfully, no Evie Hayes—let alone an Ethel Merman. The advertised Christmas 1963 season at the Melbourne Tivoli was abandoned.

Anne Hart and Mav Chadban in 1963 revival—Act II, Scene 9, Governor's Island

National Library of Australia, Canberra

Anne Hart and Mav Chadban in 1963 revival—Act II, Scene 2, Ballroom of the Hotel Brevoort

National Library of Australia, Canberra

There have, of course, been later, more successful Aussie Annies. Gloria Dawn played her twice: first, in 1967, ‘in the round’ in a large tent at Warringah Mall on Sydney’s North Shore and, a couple of years later, at David H. McIlwraith’s resplendent Lido Theatre Restaurant in Russell Street, Melbourne. Nancye Hayes, Toni Lamond and Bunny Gibson have all hit the bull’s eye. At the Adelaide Festival Centre Playhouse in 1977, English actress Dorothy Vernon played Annie to Bruce Barry’s Frank Butler, with Colin Friels as Tommy. Rhonda Burchmore was Annie and Donald Cant was Frank in a gala Victoria State Opera concert performance at the State Theatre in Melbourne in 1993. In 2004 the State Theatre also hosted the Melbourne-based Production Company’s semi-staged version with Marina Prior as Annie and Scott Irwin as Frank.

And so Annie lives on in our hearts and on our stages. Hailing the 1999 New York revival, New York Post critic Clive Barnes predicted: ‘Berlin’s greatest achievement in the theatre will carry happily into the next century and a bit beyond. Annie Get Your Gun will always be a musical for the ages, one of the Broadway theatre’s enduring triumphs.’

Dancers Ron Dillon, Tom Briggs and Colin Fitzgerald making up for the ‘I'm an Indian Too’ song, Melbourne, 1947. Photo by Ivan.

State Library of New South Wales, Sydney

Marie La Varre in her dressing room, Melbourne, 1947. Photo by Ivan.

State Library of New South Wales, Sydney

Hayes Gordon’s recording of ‘My Defences Are Down’ (taken from an Australian radio broadcast from 1957) can be heard on YouTube:

Listen to Evie Hayes in Annie Get Your Gun (1948)

3LO Nostalgia Show, 19 February 1989: Frank Van Straten and Clive Stark with John and Anna Crampton. Recording courtesy of Frank Van Straten.

When the Australian cast recordings were subsequently included on the commercial Bayview CD release An International ANNIE GET YOUR GUN [CS003] by producer, Peter Pinne (together with the original Paris and London cast highlights recordings) Steven Suskin praised the recordings in his review for the US Playbill website as follows:

The five Melbourne tracks might well serve as the Rosetta stone of Annie Get Your Gun. Ethel Merman recorded the songs for Decca, in what many see as the definitive Annie Get Your Gun. But Ethel’s is a studio operation, without a theatrical feel to it. These newly recovered Melbourne tracks come from a live tape (of which only Act II has apparently survived). Here we have Annie Get Your Gun in performance, as written. We get the tempos, the energy, and—not the least of it—the laughs, giving us a truer sense of the Broadway original than we’ve had before. This was apparently a close remounting by the Broadway producers, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and reveals a fast, brash 1940s musical.