Dear NBC…THIS should be your next musical

You can count me among those who were underwhelmed by last year’s “The Sound of Music” and bored by Thursday night’s “Peter Pan.”

But if NBC wants to atone for its sins, here’s my humble suggestion: Reba McEntire in “Annie Get Your Gun.”

Back in 2002, she replaced Bernadette Peters in a revival on Broadway. My wife has loved this show since she saw it in high school, so we snagged some nosebleed seats up in the balcony to see this shortly before Reba left the cast.

It was, in a word, sensational.

Seriously: this was the kind of legendary performance people are still talking about, over a decade later.

At the time, Ben Brantley in The New York Times raved: 

Making her Broadway debut, Reba McEntire glides into the title role of ”Annie Get Your Gun” like a seabird landing on water. Only a year ago this chart-topping country singer admitted to never having seen Irving Berlin’s classic show of love and marksmanship. And while her fat résumé includes plenty of concert tours and some parts in movies, it doesn’t embrace a star turn in a big old-fashioned musical, much less in a town that eats overreaching achievers for breakfast.

And yet there she is, reigning over the vast Marquis Theater with the same seeming effortlessness with which her character shoots clay pigeons. Like Annie Oakley, she’s a nonchalant showoff, making a highly polished performance look so easy that you wonder why we aren’t all Broadway stars.

Ms. McEntire has also, by the way, managed to put a highly personal, proprietary stamp on a role that the ghost of Ethel Merman has always dominated, creating the most disarmingly unaffected Annie in years. She applies both her no-nonsense twang and balladeer’s throb to make familiar songs sound as fresh as this morning, suggesting Berlin by way of Nashville instead of Tin Pan Alley.

…Ms. McEntire’s years on the road have given her an instinctive rapport with audiences. In her first solo, ”You Can’t Get a Man With a Gun,” she looks out into the darkened theater with a complicity that hooks you for good. Yet this isn’t a concert performance; it’s an expansive, crowd-embracing characterization that’s exactly as big as it can and should be.

I should perhaps say that after seeing this revival the first time, I would have sworn I’d have returned to it only at gunpoint. Never mind. Ms. McEntire doesn’t need a gun to bring Manhattan to its knees.

Unfortunately, she only did the role for a short time. It was never recorded—though I seem to remember that CBS  had hoped to produce it for television, but it never happened.

NBC, this is your chance. Visit YouTube and you’ll find some highlights from her performance. Take a look below. Then pick up the phone. Call Reba McEntire. Make this happen.

And all will be forgiven.