Boasting more great songs than most shows but more outright corniness than a Jolly Green Giant, Irving Berlin’s 1946 musical is no cinch to sell to a modern audience. So fair play to Richard Jones’s production for shooting for something new.

Four saloon pianos handle the entire score; a couple of numbers, including the jauntily insensitive I’m an Indian Too, have vamoosed; and the Wild West setting has moved, not always comfortably, into the 20th century.

The result is an enjoyable two hours of escapism that lacks the sure aim of its sharp-shooting heroine, Annie Oakley. Jane Horrocks as Annie starts out as a gawky naif in a Mickey Mouse T-shirt before her success in Buffalo Bill’s travelling circus turns her into a gawky celebrity. She’s sparky, adorable, plays it big — yet needs to play it even bigger; and she lacks the truly big voice that would really grab hold of the songs. That lack of a big voice suits her unrefined character up to a point — she sells Doin’ What Comes Natur’lly just fine. But the piano backing requires sustained exuberance, otherwise the performance looks like a dress rehearsal. Skilful though the cast of 20 are, the show lacks hips.

Ultz’s widescreen, shallow set doesn’t always help. It looks right as a Fifties-style country diner or a New York club, but it stifles Philippe Giraudeau’s choreography. Some of the sightlines are poor. And sometimes it’s gimmicky — a conveyor belt upstage carrying model telegraph poles to make it look as if the cast are standing in a train carriage is a cute idea that turns clumsy. One of the cast has to sit taking the models off the end of the belt, and soon you’re too busy staring at him to bother with the story.

Similarly, Jones uses sound effects well to convey Annie’s marksmanship — then overplays his hand by having us imagine her parachuting from a plane, machinegun in hand. It’s funny, but too Goonish. An amusing bit of doctored period footage shows Annie flicking the V-sign back to Winston Churchill as the circus reaches Europe. But when she meets Hitler the tone turns sour and you start wondering if you’re actually in the Thirties.

Still, Berlin’s skilful, witty songs continue to cut through, lacking the bombast of much musical theatre. The cast lend some goose-bump harmonies to There’s No Business Like Show Business. Anything You Can Do and They Say It’s Wonderful are almost indestructible. Julian Ovendon has good looks and even better pipes as Frank Butler, the pigheaded chauvinist charmer whom Annie loves and competes with as a shot. And there’s a wonderfully ripe turn from John Marquez, talking fluent Brooklynese as the money man, Charlie.

So, switch off your critical faculties, swallow the cheerfully regressive, Taming of the Shrew-ish sexual politics of Herbert and Dorothy Fields’s book, and enjoy the ride. Jones’s production isn’t fully achieved yet, but Annie Get Your Gun is still great fun.

Box office: 020-7922 2922, to Jan 2 www.youngvic.org

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