Aimin' To Please

What she shares with Lucille Ball, other than the appearance of having a ball, is a natural gift for vulnerable, completely open-hearted silliness. But McEntire's mature persona usually won her Hallmark Hall of Fame-style earth-mama parts. "I always ask for funny scripts. Don Williams, Andy Williams' brother, was one of my first managers, and he always said, 'You are the next Lucille Ball.' And nobody else saw it, till this, because I really wasn't that funny in Tremors; it was pretty much deadpan."

Now they see it, and then some. Annie director Graciela Daniele--who goes the critics one better, referring to McEntire as "my goddess"--recalls that in rehearsal they had a kind of shorthand: "I would say, 'Give me one Lucy there, Reba, not two!'"

If Annie and Lucy were both female showbiz pioneers, so was Reba, especially in the '80s. Nashvillians still talk about how she fired her managers and agents and divorced her first husband (who had a hand in her bookings) when they paid too little mind to her pleas for more personalized attention. She and second husband, Narvel Blackstock--who began as her steel-guitar player, then, says McEntire, "got promoted to road manager, then promoted to manager, then demoted, I guess he might think sometimes, to husband"--started their own company, with interests in promotion, publishing, and almost every aspect of the music business. "If a female spoke up way too much, you became like a little barking dog, a little pest. And so I learned not to bitch, but just to work harder and find a better way of doing things, and sometimes making it look like it was a man's idea. I learned that being in a man's world rodeoing and ranching. It just took me a while to figure out that that and [showbiz] are the same world."

In the early '90s, she coasted for a bit, spending time with her son, Shelby, now 11, while Blackstock looked after the company's other managerial clients. They've subsequently let those artists go to concentrate on Reba's "second wind."

McEntire ought to sound more winded than she is: She'll be taking 10 days off from the musical to go to L.A. in April and shoot a pilot for a sitcom, Sally, which, enough laughs and the actors' and writers' strikes willing, will be a WB series in the fall. Also come autumn, she'll have her fourth best-of album, Greatest Hits, Vol. 3 (it's her third on MCA), preceded by a tour beginning July 13. That puts a definite finale on her run as Annie, though producers are hoping to nab her for an extra month beyond her currently scheduled end date, May 27. Beyond that, she's slated to appear in a CBS TV adaptation of the show.

You can take Reba out of Annie--much to the producers' chagrin, since box office receipts quadrupled after she assumed the role--but she swears you won't take the Annie out of Reba. The gun she might leave behind, but not the grin. "The thing I think I will take [out of this experience] is that I'm more myself on this stage than I am on the stage being Reba McEntire. As Reba I'm real...professional," she says, half-apologetically. "Very...hmm...dignified. And that may change after doing Annie Oakley. I think I'll be more my real goofy self than I ever was. I'm gonna take Reba McEntire back to my stage."