There's hardly a musical comedy role more iconic than Annie Oakley, as persistent images of Ethel Merman in Irving Berlin's "Annie Get Your Gun" attest. But not for Jenn Colella, the young star of Pittsburgh CLO's revival, opening Tuesday.

"I'd only ever heard the music," she confesses in a lunchtime interview on the first day of CLO's one-week rehearsal sprint. "I hadn't seen it or even read it." But when she did, she found it "funny and touching."

Colella comes to the sharpshooter Oakley from another "scrappy country chick" (she switches right into the accent that goes with it) -- Sissy, the female lead in "Urban Cowboy," with which she burst on the Broadway scene in 2004 without even an Equity card.

Feisty and wiry, sitting in the same interview chair as Cathy Rigby did a couple of weeks ago, Colella has a similar demeanor. Although much taller than Rigby, she's played some of the same roles, including Peter Pan.

And she has the life experience for Annie Oakley: As a kid she was good at sports and had to put up with a lot of teasing. "I was proud of being a girl and being able to dribble, but it was hard to get them to see me as a ballplayer," just like Annie Oakley's trying to get Frank Butler to respect her as a sharpshooter and a woman.

Her childhood home was in Summerville, just outside Charlestown, S.C. It's hardly Annie Oakley-rural, but in seventh grade, she had hunter ed, "so I'm comfortable with a gun in my hand. But I was so little, as opposed to the monster you see before you now," she laughs, "that I couldn't get the butt on my shoulder." She had to brace it on her upper arm muscle.

It didn't slow her up. There wasn't much theater in Summerville and her family didn't have much money, but she did odd jobs to persuade her mother to let her perform.

As an undergraduate at Columbia College, S.C., she studied theater but also music, and she played basketball, tennis and flag football. The latter was "pretty ferocious -- you can't block a woman and not have her take it personally." Senior year, she was the quarterback.

Then she earned an MFA in theater at the University of California at Irvine. In Los Angeles, she did stand-up, "principally to be noticed," because there, "theater is valued in a different way" -- by which she means, very little. And in stand-up, "you can fail and then win them over," which is good training.

"The toughest part is hanging out in the clubs. Those comics are a real dark bunch, unhappy, disrespectful of each other." For a while she opened for Andrew Dice Clay, who's as dark as it gets. "I couldn't even hold the mike, it had so much misogyny in it," she remembers.

But it must have toughened her. As a child, she already idolized some tough, funny women: Barbra Streisand, Lily Tomlin, Goldie Hawn, Gilda Radner. "They're hilarious and they'll break your heart," she says.

Musicals Colella has done include "Heartland," "Ring of Fire" and "The Times, They Are A-Changin'." On TV, she's done "Cashmere Mafia," and her first film, "Uncertainty," will be out in the fall.

Almost all her musicals have been new shows, so "Annie get Your Gun" is "something I can luxuriate in, because it's Irving Berlin, it's tested." She came to CLO because she heard it was "a cool place to work."

From Annie Oakley's point of view, Colella says, the musical's conflict is between her pride in her gifts and needing to make herself "dainty and beautiful" for a man. It's a conflict between "ego and heart" in which ego is the enemy.

The man she wants, Frank Butler (played by Matt Ashford of "Days of Our Lives") is "definitely the most handsome guy she's met: He's got all his teeth and he's gorgeous," while she's unwashed and chewing on her nails. But Annie sets out to get him -- she has Colella's spunk.

The CLO one-week sprint doesn't faze her; she's used to what she calls "bungee theater," tightly scheduled summer rep where you have to be prepared coming in.

"I turned down other things to come do this show," she says. "It's one I'm meant to do. CLO has an amazing reputation."

First Published: July 20, 2008, 8:00 a.m.