Crossing Over: Deborah Voigt in Annie Get Your Gun at Glimmerglass
Did it all start with Ezio Pinza – this crossover practice of opera stars singing American musical theatre? Pinza certainly was the most famous, making ladies of the late 1940s swoon in Rogers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific. The latest crossover explorer is Deborah Voigt singing the role of Annie Oakley in Annie Get Your Gun at Glimmerglass. Playing Annie gives her something in common with Susan Lucci, the soap opera actress; Reba McEntire, the country singer; as well as Ethel Merman. Unexpected company for an internationally renowned dramatic soprano.
Annie Get Your Gun is based on the true story of Annie Oakley, a petite sharpshooter from Darke County, Ohio. When the naïve, illiterate backwoods girl arrives in Cincinnati with her younger siblings to sell animals she’s killed, she is enlisted by a local innkeeper into a shooting challenge sponsored as a promotion by Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show: They’ll give $100 to any local person who can beat their star, Frank Butler (San Francisco Opera baritone, Rod Gilfry). Oakley immediately falls head over heels for Frank, outshoots him, wins the money and joins the show; Frank falls for Annie as well. Thinking she’s going to make him love her even more, she surprises him with a complicated shooting trick for the show. Instead, his ego crushed, Frank leaves both her and Buffalo Bill Cody’s show and joins the rival Pawnee Bill's Far East Show.
Read the full review by Nancy Salz at the Berkshire Review, an International Journal for the Arts.

