Show Description

ShowDown is David Parker and The Bang Group's new dance set to many of the songs featured in the score of Irving Berlin's musical comedy classic, Annie Get Your Gun.  Working with a series of beautiful recordings made by Judy Garland and Howard Keel for the 1949 MGM film version of the Broadway show (with Garland eventually replaced by Betty Hutton), ShowDown takes the songs out of their original narrative context and places them in a wholly contemporary, choreographic world.  ShowDown unravels the venerable musical's themes of a show down between the sexes, the lure of show business and the juncture of love and ambition with freewheeling and anarchic vigor.  The eight dancers of The Bang Group, dip and swirl, thud, hoof, tap and sing with their characteristic mix of precision and abandon through Parker's carefully crafted dances.  No one is Annie and yet, perhaps, everyone is.  Parker treats the score seriously as music and poetry and allows the humor to bubble up inevitably where it will.   The cast is headed by Bang Group stalwarts Jeffrey Kazin, Amber Sloan, Emily Tschiffely, Nic Petry and Marta Miller joined by Parker himself along with Terence Duncan and Zack Winokur. Costumes are by Kate McDowell.

Produced in cooperation with The Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization
on behalf of the Estate of Irving Berlin.