 In August 1945, while in the hospital recovering from the Caesarean birth of her second child, Merman was visited by Dorothy Fields, who proposed she star as Annie Oakley in a musical her brother Herbert and she were writing with Jerome Kern.Merman accepted, but in November, Kern suffered a stroke while in New York City visiting Rodgers and Hammerstein (the producers of the show) and died a few days later.Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II invited Irving Berlin to replace him, and the result was "Annie Get Your Gun", which opened on May 16, 1946 at the Imperial Theatre, where it ran for nearly three years and 1,147 performances.