June 8, 14, 15, 1958

"Anyway, you're the best shot in the whole world."

"Yes, but you can't get a man with a gun!"

"How can shy, awkward Annie Oakley, the back-woods `shot,' win Frank Butler, the handsome, care-free sharpshooter with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show?"

The answer makes Annie Get Your Gun, directed by Pegge-Lee Haggard, an exciting play. Byron Fish's column (based on a letter to him from Morris Moen) summed it up well:

"The Mountaineers say that for this week, at least, they have about the shortest short-line (railroad) in the country. It is portable `and one of the few railroads with no bonded indebtedness....'

"One scene calls for a railroad coach. On a regular stage, the curtain goes up and there's the coach. The Forest Theater has no curtain. The coach must be rolled into the scene, with actors on it. So The Mountaineer Players built a `railroad,' from the `backstage' woods to the playing area....

"Annie, Get Your Gun has about the most elaborate settings yet attempted."

The sets were indeed special, including a two-story hotel, the railroad car and a cattle boat.

Evan Sanders wrote, in a letter to his sisters:

"Wish I had had [the Dakota dictionary] last spring when I was Sitting Bull ... At one point, where Sitting Bull is scaring Dolly Tate into revealing her plans by threatening to scalp her (my best scene—it brought down the house) I had to keep yelling "Tanka Oytanka!" as if it were some horrible threat. Now, all too late, I find that all it was was Sitting Bull's name: Tanka Yotanka, which the author had misspelled. Apparently he was just proclaiming his glorious name by way of threat, but there was I, making it sound like a description of what Dolly would look like afterward. But we get so few Dakotas in our audience I don't suppose it mattered."

Annie Get Your Gun drew an audience of over 2,400 to the three performances.