By James Hadley in London

The Young Vic Theatre received mixed reviews for its recent revival of Irving Berlin's musical Annie Get Your Gun, but it had me grinning throughout - for its pure entertainment value but also the freshness of its tone.

Musical theatre is not the subtlest of theatre genres. Most people who don't like overblown sentiment, broadly played characterisations and jazz hands showiness tend to give musicals a wide berth. So the comparative realism in this production gave it a distinct feel, with some performances quite underplayed in their naturalistic subtlety.

Director Richard Jones is mostly active in the opera world, and the production values perhaps reflected that, with the set like a widescreen cinemascope landscape - a broad and shallow stage that was lino-filled mid-west diner, then train carriage with an airport's luggage conveyor belt used to carry elements of the passing landscape through the background, and then the interior of a hotel apartment. There was no big West End spectacle here.

Sharpshooter Annie Oakley, famously played by Broadway belter Ethel Merman, was here played by Jane Horrocks (best known as a singer for her role in the film Little Voice) and champion gunman Frank Butler by Julian Ovenden. This attractive pair had beautiful voices to carry the chirpy witticisms and soothing ballads of Irving Berlin's score.

Again in keeping with a pared-back approach to musical theatre, rather than an orchestra, the score was played by four pianists, sitting downstage of the performers. This may have led to a thinner sounding score than would otherwise have been the case, but it also made you listen to the music in a new way - it's quite a rarity to hear a piece played by a quartet of pianos like this. The entr'acte to the second half of the show had film projections of Annie Oakley on a world tour, with the pianists playing variations of the show's tunes based on the music styles of the relevant countries.

The understated playing styles were extended into the mise-en-scene of many of the songs - a point at which reality is usually thrown out the window in any production. The moment when a scene moves from dialogue to song is a key challenge for any such production, and I've rarely seen it happen as seamlessly and naturally as here. I totally believed that this was a world where it was a normal, everyday thing for people to break into lyrics in the middle of their breakfast.

For me, the show stopping number came when Jane Horrocks sang 'I've got the sun in the morning and the moon at night'. It comes quite late in the piece, when her character has undergone a transformation from awkward hillbilly to glamorous celebrity, and she wore a sparkling evening gown based on the American flag, with diamonds and platinum blonde hair. As she sang, she moved among the guests of a swanky party, singing of her happy contentment with life, and they reacted to her as if she were an opiate. Now this isn't exactly a realistic scene, I know, but this was all done in a stylishly underplayed way that located it within their reality of indulgent socialites, rather than everyone suddenly jumping out of the frame into an overblown cartoon style. To me, this seemed a fresh innovation for handling a classic piece of musical theatre.

It's great to see such a work being revised with similar respect as would be given to a revival of an opera or Shakespearean text, and certainly felt like a well informed pointer for the future of musical theatre revivals.