Original Cast Recording from a Broadway show that went on forever (1,147 performances!) and gave new wings to career of unstoppable Ethel Merman who at the age of 38 was perceived as washed up by theatre producers. When original producer (Mike Todd) declined working with a star who in his opinion belonged to out-of-fashion older generation of performers, who else stepped in as producers but Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein who promptly engaged legendary Jerome Kern as composer. Than Kern suddenly died and that funny,little russian immigrant Irving Berlin (who was some twenty years older than Merman,but that didn't count as disadvantage for a male composer) took the composing job, coming up with the biggest musical success of his already brilliant career.
Irving Berlin was so annoyingly successful for decades that his critics claimed he never composed anything himself but had someone else ghost-working for him (in fact, he was self taught on piano and hummed his ideas to arranger). Despised as sentimental and not as sophisticated as some other "American songbook" composers, Berlin nevertheless was the one who composed "White Christmas" and "God Bless America" and was not resting on laurels but in his 6th decade accepted challenge to write new musical (both lyrics and music,as he always did). What he came up were classics that quickly got a new lives far outside Broadway: "There's No Business Like Show Business", "I Got Lost In His Arms" and "I Got the Sun in the Morning" turned out to be such favorites with both audience and singers that one can find them everywhere from Hollywood to Jazz albums.
Ethel Merman was of course big,brassy and loud enough to be heard outside of the theaters so she was just perfect for the role of Annie Oakley. She played the role for three long years and was terribly disappointed when Hollywood decided to make movie with another actress. It turned in a depressing vicious curse where Merman would hold hit musicals on her shoulders just to have Hollywood ignoring her when it came to movies - it happened so continuously and regularly that it surely must hurt her. Needless to say, although she might have been "too big for the screen" her way of creating many of now-classic Broadway roles was so highly original and individual that it left huge shadow on every other attempt to stage these musicals. No matter who else played these roles, one simply can't forget how "Merm" sailed trough them.
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