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REBA
Country Music's Ultimate Survivor
She is one of those unique and special celebrities who is popular enough to be known by first name alone. Her album sales are matched by no other female artist in the history of country music. Her concerts have consistently outdrawn some of the most popular male acts. Her fans have followed her through thick and thin. Every endeavor she tackles is given the heart, soul, and tenacity of a born winner, and in 2001 those traits couldn't be more evident. Of course, this woman is none other than Reba McEntire, or as we all know her, just Reba.
This year has arguably been the biggest yet of Reba's veteran career. Some may point to her success in the mid-80's or early-mid 90's as the peak of her career. For most artists, this would be the case. The Nashville music industry will only keep a superstar on top for so long. No one is immune from the cycle of superstardom. However, it's the way that Reba has avoided this common occurrence that makes her twenty-five year career all the more amazing. Look at the current working status of Ms. McEntire, and I think there's a strong case that she's still on top and not ready to turn over the reins just yet.
In 1994, Reba was given the opportunity to play the role of sharpshooter Annie Oakley in the CBS mini-series "Buffalo Girls". A lot of research was put into the role and Reba soon found that her life and experiences mirrored those of Annie in many ways. The mini-series performance garnered Reba critical acclaim, but little did she know that this would not be her last encounter with the Oakley character.
McEntire's performance in "Buffalo Girls" caught the attention of Broadway producers Fran and Barry Weissler, who were interested in reviving the musical "Annie Get Your Gun", centering around the life of Annie Oakley and her part in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. The role of Annie on Broadway was originated by Ethel Mermen, and many critics were pessimistic that the Weisslers could find a lead that could rival Ms. Merman's historic performance. For two years, Fran and Barry tried to persuade Reba and her husband-manager, Narvel Blackstock, to consider making the move to Broadway, but there was just no time in McEntire's schedule to commit to the role.
Bernadette Peters eventually landed the title role and the revival debuted at the famed Marquis Theater in early 1999. Peters won rave reviews and even earned a Tony award that year for best actress in a musical. It was during Peters' run that McEntire and husband Blackstock had the opportunity to see the musical for the first time. During intermission, both agreed that they had to pursue this. They planned in advance and set aside the first six months of 2001 for McEntire's inaugural run on Broadway. Peters left before that, but the Weisslers placed Cheryl Ladd in the role on an interim basis until McEntire was ready to jump on board.
On January 29, 2001, after weeks of rehearsal, McEntire debuted as Annie Oakley on the Marquis stage. It didn't take long for the normally vicious New York Broadway critics to react. The reviews were beyond good. Ben Brantley from the New York Times wrote, "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." In the New York Post, Clive Barnes exclaimed that the role fit McEntire "like a buckskin glove". "She is waif-like cute. She is whimsical. She is eager. She is over-the-top funny. And her singing, substituting country character for Broadway belt, gives the old Berlin numbers a special piquancy." Critics could not praise her enough for the naturalness and talent that she brought to the role. Reba McEntire had arrived on Broadway, and she had arrived big time.
Her successful six-month Broadway run ended on June 22, 2001 with both tears and smiles. Mayor Rudy Guliani proclaimed the 22nd "Reba McEntire Day" in New York. McEntire's parents, Clark and Jacqueline, flew in from Oklahoma as a surprise for their daughter. Cast and crew held a celebration in the lobby of the Marquis Theater to toast both McEntire, and her co-star in the musical, Brent Barrett. Once the celebrating was finished inside, McEntire left the theater to find a horde of anxious fans waiting outside the stage door to wish her a fond farewell.
Many would think that after a long run on Broadway performing eight shows a week, McEntire would take a rest and strategize her next career move. Anyone who knows Reba however, knows that resting is not an option. After a short family vacation to Ireland, McEntire started her next venture; a 24-city all-female concert tour with Martina McBride. Dubbed the Girls' Night Out tour, Reba and Martina co-headline the show with up-and-coming female vocalists Sara Evans, Jamie O'Neal, and Carolyn Dawn Johnson opening.
The tour opened on July 13 at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas and wraps up this upcoming weekend in Louisville, KY at the Kentucky State Fair. Reviews have been excellent for all of the ladies, especially the closer, Ms. Reba. A Los Angeles Times reviewer had this to say about McEntire's performance: "She was in a class by herself... oozing self-assurance and not following anyone's footsteps, but showcasing those she's spent the
last 25 years perfecting. However adept she is at opening her throat to full throttle when the time is right, McEntire is a far more experienced vocalist than most of her peers, one who knows that dynamic peaks require valleys if they're to mean anything."
To compliment the music she sings on the current tour, Reba cut a few new songs while she was on Broadway and put them together with some previous hits for her next album, "Greatest Hits Volume III". The album is expected to hit store shelves on September 25. It contains three new singles and twelve of her greatest hits from the past several years. One new song will be a remake of the Kenny Rogers tune, "Sweet Music Man", which Reba called on bluegrass singer Alison Krauss to produce. "I came across a band, Nickel Creek, that had this unbelievable pure and beautiful sound. When I found out that Alison produced them, I thought I would love to see what she could do with one of my records. I called her up and we moved our schedules around and made it work. She recorded the tracks in Nashville then flew up to New York to record my vocal during the day before I had to sing 'Annie' at night. Then she took the whole thing back to Nashville and worked on the mix. I think it turned out great. I'm so proud to have worked with her and hope we'll get to do it again."
Another one of the brand new songs on "Greatest Hits Volume III" is Reba's current radio single "I'm A Survivor". At press time, the song sits at #30 on the Billboard Country Singles chart in just its fourth week on. It is a ballad about a strong-willed woman who comes out on top when in the face of adversity. Sounds a lot like the television sitcom that McEntire is starring in for the WB network this fall. No, she's not resting after the concert tour either. Her next mission to conquer: television.
"Reba" is set to debut on September 14 on the WB television network. It is positioned at 9 pm eastern time on Friday nights, where the network hopes to grab back the teens and young families that once made ABC's TGIF lineup a major success. The premise of the show is most likely one that you haven't seen in a television comedy. Reba plays a Texas housewife who's marriage of twenty years is in the process of ending. Her husband has left the family and impregnated his twenty-something mistress. To top it all off, her 17-year-old daughter is pregnant by the high school football star. This doesn't exactly sound like the Cleaver household, but McEntire believes the issues tackled in this show are not all that different from the lyrics in a country song and also her own life. "This woman takes the bull by the horns and says 'All right, this is a disaster. We're going to handle the situation. We're going to stay together and we're going to come through, and we're going to hold our heads high,' " she said. "That's a lot like my mama. Any kind of situation that came up in our family, she knew that we were falling apart. But she stood strong and said, 'We're going to go ahead. Put a smile on your face and let's go forward.' Country music used to be, when I was growing up, basically singing in bars, drinking, leaving, and cheating. Now it's dealing more with social issues -- all of them I think. This is not going to be new territory for me."
Just last week McEntire went back into the studio to re-record portions of "I'm A Survivor". It will be used as the theme song to the "Reba" TV show. Once the Girls' Night Out Tour wraps in Louisville on Saturday, the McEntire family will move into a rented house on LA's west side and Reba will settle in to the most normal life she has had in almost thirty years. "I'll be home for dinner every night, have weekends free. That hasn't happened to me since I was in high school."
Television sitcoms generally tape between 22 and 26 episodes each season, so the series should keep Reba firmly planted in Hollywood well into the spring of 2002. Work on shows for the season generally wraps up in March or April. After that, a deal has already been inked between McEntire, CBS, and the producing team of "Annie Get Your Gun" to bring a movie version of the hit musical to the CBS network. It will be interesting to see what kind of musical journey McEntire takes once that is completed. No doubt it will be one that will turn more heads and introduce even more fans to country music.
August 2001 - Jason Anderson - Take Country Back 'Girl's Night Out' Photo Credit: Michele Venesky
From USA Today
02/28/2001 - Updated 09:21 AM ET
McEntire gets way more than Annie's gun
By Arlene Vigoda, USA TODAY
Lassoing the title role in Broadway's Annie Get Your Gun was a case of doing what comes naturally for Reba McEntire. The former Oklahoma rodeo barrel racer turned country singer and actress says she was born to play the rollicking, sharp-shootin', gun-totin' Annie Oakley. (Her Broadway run, which is getting rave reviews, began Jan. 26 and ends June 1.)
"I was a huge tomboy like her, and we're both silly and vulnerable and innocent," she says. "I fell in love with the character, the story and the music, and it's the most fun I've ever had on stage."
McEntire also will take to the concert stage this summer to promote her third greatest-hits album and to the TV studio this fall in a WB network comedy, playing a Texas woman who discovers that her husband has a pregnant mistress and that her teenage daughter also is pregnant.
Her personal life fares better that that of her sitcom counterpart: McEntire and husband/ manager Narvel Blackstock have been married since 1989, and they have a 10-year-old son, Shelby.
With so many high-profile couples breaking up recently, how do she and Blackstock keep from becoming marriage casualties? "We have fun," McEntire says. "Narvel watches out after me and has faith in me, and there's nothing greater than having someone who totally believes in you."
From Playbill
Doin' What Comes Naturally: Reba Reigns as Annie Oakley
09 Apr 2001
Like the man said: You can take the girl out of the country . . .
But you can’t plop Reba McEntire down smack-dab on Broadway and expect a citified "chantoosie." The country clings to her like a calico dress—and that’s a good thing, since she happens to be starring as Annie Oakley in Irving Berlin’s grab bag of great show tunes, Annie Get Your Gun, at the Marquis Theatre.
Even McEntire is amazed at what a comfortable fit it is. The two stars grew up in parallel universes—fiercely competitive, in the world of men. Phoebe Anne Oakley Moses fired her first shot at age 7 and, by 12, was sole support of her large, hungry family. The man she got with a gun—sharpshooter Frank Butler—she actually married; he gracefully retired to manage her career and, a gentleman of deference to the end, died 18 days after her.
By the same token, McEntire was raised on an 8,000-acre cattle spread in Chockie, Oklahoma, the third of four children. She and her sisters helped her father, grandfather and brother ranch, then helped their mom cook and clean while the menfolk stretched out on the couch. Politically incorrect times, yes—but, she says, "a responsible way of life for us."
She was hellbent to be a teacher in 1974 when, in her sophomore year at Southeastern Oklahoma State University, her recording career kicked in. Today she is a corporation (Starstruck Entertainment) on Nashville’s Music Row, and six of her 11 albums have topped Billboard’s country charts. She married the steel guitarist in her band, Narvel Blackstock, who stowed the instrument to run her career. Son Shelby is ten.
McEntire had some earlier target practice at Annie Oakley—via the CBS-TV movie, "Buffalo Girls"—playing the character in the second act of her life on tour in Europe with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. "It’s so ironic that here I am a few years later, playing Annie Oakley again"—or maybe she just doesn’t know how to read her tea leaves: She turned down the Molly Brown role in Titanic, but Lord knows, should she ever care to second that Broadway motion, she couldn’t find a better vehicle than The Unsinkable Molly Brown.
McEntire is Country Music’s Renaissance Woman. A four-time Country Music Association Female Vocalist of the Year and one of only five women to win the CMA’s coveted Entertainer of the Year, she turns out to be a great "natural actress," something she never knew till she film-bowed in "Tremors," a 1990 sci-fi feature. She also authored a best-selling autobiography and the homespun "Comfort From a Country Quilt."
Her final frontier—Broadway—is where no female C&W star has gone before. She tiptoed into the big leap by getting her life together and taking it on the road for a year. "The Singer’s Diary," she says, "was a two-act play that spanned from 1974 to the present. The first act was me telling my life story through dialogue and songs. Act two was a full-blown concert. Doing that helped me decide to do Annie Get Your Gun."
The only thing Reba McEntire doesn’t do is write her own songs. "I go to professionals for that," she admits, and they don’t come any more professional than Irving Berlin. Her favorite AGYG song—"I Got Lost in His Arms"—was predecessor Bernadette Peters’s favorite. "I recorded it the other day, and I coulda died and gone to heaven right then."
—Harry Haun
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Some Other Sites Of Interest
Rebas Official Site
Starstruck Studios
Fancy Reba (a fan site)
CMT
