Giles Woodforde on a show that is a good shot at Irving Berlin's iconic music

The title ‘Greatest Musical Ever’ is easy enough to bandy about, but Irving Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun has to be high on the list of possible contenders. With numbers There’s No Business Like Show Business, Doin’ What Comes Natur’lly, You Can’t Get a Man with a Gun, They Say It’s Wonderful, and Anything You Can Do, the score is hard to beat — indeed, it’s easy to think of many composers who haven’t managed to produce that number of hits in a lifetime, never mind in a single show.

The story is based on the real-life Annie Oakley, a gun-toting American Western lady of real pzzazz — it is she who utters the unforgettable line: “You can’t shoot a male in the tail like a quail” in the number You Can’t Get a Man with a Gun. She takes a job in the show Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, and there she encounters Frank Butler, another sharp shooter.

This week Annie Get Your Gun hits Oxford in a new touring production. The show is set in a cheerily striped big top (designer Paul Farnsworth), and radiates colourful spectacle, although overall cast numbers are actually quite small.

The illusion that there are lots of people about has been enhanced by placing the excellent band on stage.

Three ladies just in front of me in the audience were really determined to get in the mood, for they arrived wearing Stetsons — which they thoughtfully removed before greeting the star, Jason Donovan, with a loud cheer as he made his first entrance.

That cheer turned out to be in complete contrast to the opening chorus, There’s No Business Like Show Business, which is delivered curiously sotto voce.

Indeed that proved to be director Ian Talbot’s approach almost throughout: every number is performed with great musicality, but I often yearned for a higher level of sheer extrovert energy.

Jason Donovan delivers a low-key vocal performance to match, but there is a real spark in his relationship with Emma Williams’s superbly sung and feisty Annie — their wonderfully funny delivery of Anything You Can Do is unforgettable, and They Say It’s Wonderful brings a tear to the eye. There’s warm support from Norman Pace as Buffalo Bill, and Ed Currie as Chief Sitting Bull.

Company dancing and singing is spot on, and everyone seemed unperturbed by the technical gremlins in the second act on opening night. This production needs a little more joie de vivre, but it’s still great to revisit Berlin’s magnificent score.

Annie Get Your Gun
New Theatre, Oxford
Until Saturday
0844 871 3020, atgtickets.com/oxford