Annie Get Your Gun... the story

Annie Get Your Gun opened at the Imperial Theater on May 16, 1946. It had been written specifically for Ethel Merman. The New York production of Annie Get Your Gun ran for 1,147 performances and was the third longest running musical of the 1940s.

The heroine is a rough and tumble backwoods girl. We first meet up with her at the Wilson House, a summer hotel on the outskirts of Cincinnati, Ohio. She betrays that she is an uncultivated female who only knows to do that which comes naturally to her ("Doin' What Comes Natur'lly"). She soon meets up with Frank Butler of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. He is a big, sentimental fellow who is attracted only to sweet and demure girls ("The Girl That I Marry"). Annie finds Frank appealing, but she lacks the gift of getting men to become interested in her ("You Can't Get a Man With a Gun"). After she demonstrates her prowess with a gun, Buffalo Bill convinces her to join his show.  Now she and Frank have one thing in common, show business, and with Buffalo Bill they proceed to sing its praises ("There's No Business Like Show Business"). 

Six weeks have passed. The scene shifts to a Pullman car of an Overland train speeding to Minneapolis. By now Frank and Annie have begun to manifest an interest in this thing called love ("They Say It's Wonderful"). At the Arena Frank confesses that he has begun to succumb to Annie's vigorous charms ("My Defenses Are Down"). A Wild West Show then takes place within the Arena. Annie wows the crowd, and following the program Annie is adopted into the Sioux tribe ("I'm an Indian, Too").  But Frank, his manhood threatened by Annie’s considerable skill, leaves to join Pawnee Bill’s show.

The romance of Annie and Frank now encounters difficulties by virtue of the fact that they are rivals, each being a member of a different Wild West company. Annie bemoans the fact that she has been weak enough to fall for Frank ("I Got Lost in His Arms"), and tries finding consolation in the fact that she has a good many things to be happy over, even if love is denied her ("I Got the Sun in the Morning").

Their problems find a near resolution when the two Wild West Shows plan to merge into a single outfit, but there is still a good deal of competition between and Frank and Annie ("Anything You Can Do"), that must be resolved.

Annie Get Your Gun was the greatest box-office triumph of Irving Berlin's rich Broadway career; it is his only musical to achieve an initial run of more than one thousand performances. The score is his best and most varied for the theatre, yielding as it does at least half a dozen substantial song hits. (One of these, "Show Business", has since become the unofficial anthem of the American theatre.)