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OF 'ANNIE' A THREE-PART SERIES |
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PART ONE: ANNIE AT 45 A detailed look at an American musical theater classic-- How it began and what has happened to its luminous young star and the others who brought it to Broadway.
At left, Andrea McArdle in the original Broadway company of "Annie." At right, McArdle all grown up, now in her mid-40s. |
FIRST OF THREE PARTS
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- aging “Annie” fan |
of TheColumnists.com
“Annie”
opened on Broadway April 21, 1977, and by the following morning
12-year-old Andrea McArdle--singing her scrappy little heart
out as the ever-hopeful Annie--was a junior megastar.
While movies and television have struck gold with platoons of
young stars, from Jackie Cooper, Margaret O’Brien, and Ricky
Nelson to Ronnie Howard, Tatum O’Neal and Macaulay Culkin,
it’s almost unheard of for Broadway to deliver a child star,
let alone one with the sparks that Andrea McArdle gave off. No
other kids’ names leap readily to mind--not even Daisy Egan
in “The Secret Garden”--because Broadway is aimed at
adults, with rare exceptions like “You’re a Good Man,
Charlie Brown,” but even that show ran off-Broadway and
featured grownups as kids.
The child leads in huge hits like “The Lion King,”
“Once on This Island,” and “Beauty and the Beast”
fell far short of stardom, and the young stars of “Oliver!”
on both stage and screen are now arcane trivia questions (although
Davy Jones, the original Artful Dodger in “Oliver!,”
later reinvented himself as a grownup Monkee).
When the iconic musical-to-be “Annie” opened on Broadway
32 years ago to long lines, Andrea McArdle appeared to be headed
for stardom well beyond “Annie.” She was a pint-sized
Ethel Merman, but not just because of her belting, imploring
voice. She also had innate stage presence, remarkable for a girl
who, prior to “Annie,” had been in just one professional
musical--playing a Siamese child in “The King and I”
at the Downington Inn Theater, partly owned then by Mickey Rooney,
one of America’s vintage child stars.
Unlike most kiddie stars before and after her, McArdle has worked
steadily in high-profile leads on Broadway and beyond, but, like
her luckless predecessors, she is still waiting, three decades
later, for a role to equal the one that thrust her into posterity
and threatens to leave her dangling there--albeit over her very
undead body. At 45, Andrea is scrappy as ever, searching for
a second big hit the way Annie hunted down her parents in the
musical.
An instant and constant hit that ran five years on Broadway,
“Annie” is endlessly revived (often at Christmastime),
with a succession of road companies touring the country since
1978 (a new one is now on the road, to tour through mid-2009),
and it resonates powerfully with many who saw it, were in it,
or whose daughter played in it. “Every little girl in American
wanted to be Annie,” says one of the little girls who was,
Kristy Coombs, star of the show’s first national tour.
For many kids “Annie” was the first musical they ever
saw. So the show has a snug place in lots of hearts, and not
just with Americans; it was a global smash in about 18 countries
and was translated into 24 languages. Historically, “Annie”
was one of the last traditional Broadway musicals before New
York was ruthlessly invaded by the British in garish Andrew Lloyd
Weber “poperas” like “Cats,” “Phantom
of the Opera,” and “Starlight Express,” in which
McArdle played one of the chugging roller skaters.
When she turned up to audition for “Annie” in 1976
at the Bellevue-Plaza Hotel in her hometown of Philadelphia,
Andrea was immediately cast as one of the six ragamuffin backup
orphans, Pepper, but the lead went to the more angelic Kristen
Vigard--the first choice of composer Charles Strouse, smitten
by Vigard’s plaintive voice. But after a preview week at
the Goodspeed Opera House, it was apparent that Kristen was too
quiet, soft and innocent, too fragile, for the role, not at all
the brash street-smart urchin the show’s creator/director/lyricist
Martin Charnin had in mind.
Andrea was clearly the better choice--“I was the only one
you could hear in the back of the house,” she says--so Charnin
painfully was forced to dismiss Kristen as well as her mother,
who was in the chorus. “They cast Oliver and what they
really needed was the Artful Dodger,” explains McArdle.
“Physically and vocally she [Kristin] couldn’t have
survived on the street [as Annie]--she’d be eaten alive
in a New York minute.”
Charnin says, “I had never fired anyone in my entire
life. How do you fire a 13-year-old child? But it had to be done.
Her vulnerability, an asset in the beginning, was seriously hurting
the playing of all the street-wise scenes. I was demolished by
the whole thing but I had no choice. She just didn’t have
the grit the character needed.” Charnin, recalls Kristen
tearfully even today, lacked grit himself--he left the firing
to Goodspeed’s producer Michael Price. But Vigard says,
“There was a strange sense of relief afterwards-- like
thank God, now I can just go home!”
Charnin recounts, “The minute we made the change, everything
began to fall into place. The difference between the first performance
and a week later was mind-boggling. We realized that’s where
the gold ore of the piece resided. So we rolled up our sleeves
and began working in that direction.” In a sense, the
show was molded around McArdle’s voice and persona.
In his post-hit memoir, Charnin wrote, “Andrea, who’s
tough stuff, was put into the role and the audience’s entire
attitude changed. We realized we had to stay in that vein and
strengthen Annie’s character; Andrea was the actor who could
bring the change we wanted on stage.” Once she took
over, the character became feistier, brassier. McArdle’s
stage persona shaped the character, and the show itself. “We
needed a tough kid and Annie was not little Lord Fauntleroy.
Annie was Mickey Rooney in a dress.”
Thomas Meehan, who wrote the book for “Annie,” his
first musical (he went on to write librettos for “The Producers”
and “Hairspray”), recalls: “The first girl
was a beautiful blonde angel who sang beautifully but we realized
it was a mistake for Annie to be a beautiful girl. Annie’s
got a mug face in the comic strip, and standing right behind
our beautiful little blonde girl was Andrea McArdle, whose face
was the map of Ireland and who had this incredible Ethel Merman
voice. Firing Kristin was tough. She and her mother got in the
car and left in tears.”
Vigard later returned as McArdle’s Broadway understudy when
the show opened at the Alvin Theater. For most of the “Annie”
players, the show was the high point of their show biz careers.
Only a handful made a name later, most famously Sarah Jessica
Parker (Broadway’s third Annie), also Allison Smith (“West
Wing”), Danielle Brisiboise and Molly Ringwold.
Phyllis McArdle assured Charnin that her daughter could handle
the role, so after a Sunday show he sat Andrea down on his knee.
“She seemed very, very small. I had my arms around her,
holding her in a way that I have held my own daughter so many
times. I said to her, ‘Andrea, I want you to take over the
part. I want you to be Little Orphan Annie. She started to cry,
and then asked about the young actress she would be replacing.”
They began work that night after dinner, as he taught her the
blocking. The cast took the change in stride.
From the first note of “Maybe,” McArdle absolutely
inhabited the part--physically with her jut-jawed mug, vocally
with her yearning powerhouse voice, and temperamentally with
her innate Annie-like can-do spirit that allowed her to learn
the title role in two days. Vigard was fired after Sunday’s
show and Tuesday night McArdle walked on stage and nailed the
part cold--not just then but forever.
Charnin recalls, “Andrea stayed with me and learned the
show Sunday and Monday, and Tuesday night she went on, letter
perfect. She was very self-assured. She was hired as the toughest
orphan so she already had those qualities.” He says
now that, of the thousands of Annies he’s seen and the scores
he’s cast in various companies, McArdle is still the best
he ever found, and he found her the first day when she sang “Johnny
One-Note” at her audition. Meehan remembers his jaw dropping
and thinking, “Wow! Where did this little girl come from?”
“Andrea is the armature on which this entire show is
built,” Charnin told me during a break from directing
a new “Annie” company that hit the road last fall on
an 86-city tour that could wind up on Broadway. “It’s
not a question of best - Andrea was the original, Andrea was
it! Nobody has ever been able to duplicate her, nobody’s
been able to make the score happen as she did. You’re never
going to eliminate the ghost of Andrea except when you’ve
got an audience with no recollection of her.”
Duty called Charnin to redirect yet another road tour: “I
came back to do this again to remind everybody what ‘Annie’
is all about. I got fed up with seeing these other productions
done so badly, cribbing material from the terrible John Huston-Ray
Stark movie and sticking it in the show and losing the point
of view of the piece.” Producer Stark told Charles Strouse,
the composer, he wanted to sex up the movie. “We’ll
get every kid in the world anyway. Now I want to make the movie
sexy.” Not unlike making Lolita a virgin. Strouse recalls
visiting the movie set one day and seeing Huston “sitting
on what looked like a throne above the goings on. He directed
the little girls with no emotional connection between him and
the kids at all.” The roundly scorned film starred Albert
Finney as Warbucks, with Carol Burnett as Miss Hannigan, and
Aileen Quinn’s artificially sweetened Annie.
Charnin didn’t want to cast slick child actors in the original
show. “We were looking for unfinished children, not totally
complete as performers.” He wanted to shape them himself.
“We were looking for kids with rough edges,”
like the Jets in “West Side Story” --one of whom was
originally played by Charnin. McArdle was the second child he
saw and the first he hired. “She instantly impressed
us because she was streetwise beyond belief, super-conscientious,
and had a great sense of humor,” he recalls. “She
also had a wonderful athletic body. She was tight, built like
a gymnast, the reason we first cast her as the toughest orphan.”
He goes on: “Andrea was extremely bright. She has great
instincts as an actor and impeccable instincts as a singer. When
I’d ask her to invent something she never disappointed me.
She was able to make a lot of stuff happen that I don’t
think would have happened with somebody else in the part. That’s
an invaluable difference.” Charles Strouse explains,
“We [he, Strouse, Meehan] were all three of us city guys
and we all had daughters. We all said, We’re really writing
these songs for our little girls, who are not always these sweet
dear little things--they fight, they’re tough but tender.”
McArdle brought to the part a rare sweet tomboy quality, seamlessly
blending the two opposing traits, plus a big mature voice. Most
actresses in the role tend to be either hyper robo-belters or
precious Annie dolls. Whenever they cast Annie in other companies,
subconsciously or not they’re still trying to duplicate
the McArdle brand. Meehan notes, “We somehow always have
to see about a thousand girls each time to find an Annie whenever
we cast a road company. But we found Andrea right away. It was
like a miracle.” McArdle of course had barely heard
of Little Orphan Annie: “I never understood the comic
strip when I was younger. It seemed so weird to me.”
What she most remembers about the pre-Broadway rehearsals were
“the excessive rewrites and re-conceptualizing. I’ve
never in my life seen that amount of rewrites every day. To have
to adapt to that as an adult would probably have flipped me out,
but I have a photographic memory. It didn’t throw me. But
when you’re a kid you have nothing else to worry about--career,
family, etc. Your mind is free and clear to retain things. As
a kid, you can’t get in your own way, so that saves you.”
She was a theatrical natural, eager to perform, loving the performing
aspects of gymnastics more than the athletic challenges.
Strouse says McArdle was unflappable during offstage crises,
like the time Dorothy Loudon (Miss Hannigan) got her foot stuck
in a backstage winch: “Everyone was a wreck--everyone
except Andrea McArdle, our Annie, the little girl who never seemed
to get upset over anything.” Meehan reflects, still
a bit in awe, “She was just a little trouper who walked
out on a Broadway stage with great presence and took command.
She never had anything approaching stage fright.”
But before all
that, the show had to survive a crushing early New York Times
review by the prestigious critic Walter Kerr, who journeyed two
and a half hours to East Haddam, Connecticut, to see a show he’d
heard good things about; Kerr’s word was gospel. Nearly
all the New England reviewers that covered Goodspeed, a lovingly
restored landmark opera house on the Connecticut River and a
secret national treasure, gave it raves, from major dailies to
tiny weeklies, including Boston’s hardheaded Elliot Norton,
who called it “innocently beguiling and charming most of
the time.” Ethan Mordden, author of many books on musicals,
summed up the show: “In its heart ‘Annie’ is
a George M. Cohan musical,” meaning that the rousing,
irresistibly catchy songs drive an old-fashioned tale in which
good, in the form of an adorable street urchin and her loyal
mutt, triumph decisively over evil--on Christmas Eve in the White
House, no less.
Everyone loved the show except for a few grumpy critics who objected
to a musical with kids and who thought it was, says Charnin,
“too apple pie, too American, too obvious, too sentimental.”
Most headlines in the Connecticut papers called it “Nostalgic
Fun,” “A Nice Clever Little Show,” and cooed,
“Annie, Sandy, Daddy Warbucks Will Win Your Heart,”
and “‘Annie’ Is a Smash at Goodspeed.”
Ominously, though. the applause at the end of the show the night
Walter Kerr saw it was “un-tumultuous,” reports Strouse,
and the following Sunday the headline over Kerr’s review
mght as well have been bordered in black: “Nothing’s
Comic About Annie,” at which point all the potential
Broadway backers backpedaled. Kerr called it “ideologically
treacherous,” with a confusing political viewpoint contrary
to the original strip. The show’s politics puzzled him:
why does conservative anti-New Dealer Oliver Warbucks suddenly
bond with FDR? Strouse recalls, “Kerr said in no uncertain
terms that we were not Broadway bound. We were devastated. Even
Martin [Charnin], ever optimistic, was defeated. Tom was broke.
And I felt exposed, naked, untalented, and fat.”
Next morning the “Annie” trio sat down at breakfast
and went over Kerr’s review, line by damaging line, parsing
every word, searching for a key to fix the show. “We
were like rabbis deciphering the Talmud,” notes Charnin.
They finally decided that Kerr was an FDR liberal who lived through
The Crash and perhaps felt the show made the Depression seem
too cheery and inconsequential, turning Roosevelt into a clown,
making Warbucks too liberal and Annie too saccharine. The authors
tinkered with every facet of the show, and soon the audience
was responding with standing ovations. “But we had nowhere
to go then,” says Meehan, “that was the end
of it.” Even though the show was selling out, it looked
as if Goodspeed would be its first and last stop.
The show had survived several creative trials: Charnin’s
refusal to step aside for a name director; an original opening
number (warbling apple-sellers) that didn’t work until McArdle’s
wistful “Maybe” was moved to the top of the show and
grabbed everyone by the throat (“It changed everything,”
says Meehan. “The audience fell in love with her right
away, they cared about her, and the story started to move”);
and the first Miss Hannigan was replaced by the funnier, meaner
Dorothy Loudon. Once the show found its creative footing, it
still had no producers, star or star director. And not until
Loudon joined the show on Broadway did the show have even a quasi-marquee
name. “She really and truly and genuinely hated kids,”
says Charnin, “so for that reason she was the best.”
“Annie” was nearing the end of its extended run when
Mike Nichols was coaxed up to East Haddam to see it. He decided
he had to produce it. Afterwards he told Charnin, Meehan, and
Strouse, “You’re sitting on a million dollars here”--as
things turned out, closer to a billion. Meehan says Nichols had
to be “dragged screaming to East Haddam” to
see the show. When he was told by his partner Lewis Allen, “You
gotta come up and see this show!” Meehan says Nichols
replied, “No, no, no--no way!” Allen’s
wife, playwright Jay Presson Allen, a hard-headed theater woman,
loved the show and decreed, “I think it’s a hit.”
She called Nichols in New York and ordered, “Mike,
I’m up here at Goodspeed and there’s a show I think
you should see. I don’t care if your wife is having a baby.
Get your ass up here!”
Ten days later, Sam Cohn, Nichols’s agent, called to say
Nichols wanted to produce it. Charnin recalls, “It was
a thrilling moment. At that time he was the king of Broadway
- he was hot. This show just wasn’t anything close to what
he’d done before.”
When word spread that Nichols was involved, Broadway critics
perked up, along with several agents, two of whom suggested casting
Bernadette Peters or Bette Midler as Annie (in training bras),
even though Peters, albeit baby-faced and Kewpie doll-voiced,
was 30 years old.
Nichols’ unlikely name on a decidedly un-satirical, unsophisticated,
sentimental, albeit cleverly crafted, family show produced instant
backers. Strouse says it took Nichols about half a dozen phone
calls in Cohn’s office to raise the money for the Broadway
production. The Nichols imprimatur gave “Annie” instant
credibility as something more than just another musical. If newly
anointed golden boy Mike Nichols--fresh from Tony-winning Neil
Simon long runs and films like “The Graduate” and “Who’s
Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”--was presenting “Annie,”
it must be great, or at least interesting and worth a look. Suddenly,
with Nichols' name in the ads and on posters, the jaded New York
media and Broadway-goers began to pay “Annie” serious
attention.
Charnin asserts that Nichols was not a meddling producer, even
though bringing in a hot director to produce a new musical might
sound like a recipe for offstage calamity.
“It wasn’t a recipe for calamity,” replies
Charnin. “One of the first things he said to me was,
in no uncertain terms, ‘You’re the director of this
show. I will be a sounding board. I will be there to help you
for whatever you need me for. I know how I’ve wanted producers
to function in the past was to stay out of the director’s
way, so I’ll stay out of your way.’ He never staged
a step of choreography and never wrote one word of the play or
said one word to an actor. Oh, he might have given Tom a note
or given me an idea for a song, But in a happy collaboration,
where everybody is on the same page, egos disappear like smoke.”
Meehan remarks that Nichols made good on his pledge to keep hands
off and didn’t show up at the musical until its Washington,
D.C., opening. “He took meticulous notes but they were
all about where to cut. A great number in Act II always got huge
applause but Nichols said it needed to be cut by 16 bars. So
we did it and the applause was double. It was the old thing of
leave them wanting more.”
Nichols’ presence had only one negative effect: even though
the show won seven Tonys including Best Musical, Best Original
Score, Best Book, and Best Choreography, Charnin, bizarrely,
didn’t win a Tony for directing the musical he had created
and carefully nursed for seven years. The word on the street
was that Nichols had done much of the directing--untrue and unfair.
Even Gerald Schoenfeld, then co-chairman of the Shubert Organization,
took Strouse aside and said, “Really, Charles, between
you and me. ‘Annie’ is too good. Nichols really directed
it, didn’t he?”
In his autobiography, “Put On A Happy Face,” Strouse
says that Nichols was a bit more hands-on than Meehan or Charnin
indicate. “Mike was especially vigilant,” says
Strouse, “observing and changing a great deal…Along
the way he had become a watchful shepherd--good-natured but keeping
the sheep in line nonetheless.” Meehan says that Nichols’s
name above the title “changed everything about the perception
of what it was gonna be. It legitimized the whole thing. We had
the best thing you can have--people coming with low expectations,
like I had when I first heard about it.” Strouse argued
that the only credit on the posters and the ads should be Mike
Nichols’, but was voted down.
Meanwhile, the show was changing every night. The first act had
run an hour and 40 minutes but eventually was cut to 75 minutes.
They cut a big number set in a diner with the staff singing “We
Love Annie” while dancing on the countertop. “As
we kept cutting and replacing we could feel audience reaction
going up,” says Meehan. Early in the run, Meehan recalls
a man came up to him at intermission and, spotting him scribbling
on a note pad, asked, “Have you anything to do with this
show?” Yes, smiled Meehan. “Well, it stinks!”
One of the show’s crucial changes was altering its style
and mood, moving from what Meehan calls “3-D Dickensian
reality” into a cartoon as the plot brightens. Strouse observes,
“A comic strip is an ideal basis for a musical comedy because
they are similar forms of popular culture, telling simple stories
with as few words as possible.”
In the show’s most ingenious “Hello, Dolly!” moment,
the comic strip Annie suddenly appears at the top of a big staircase
in her trademark red dress, Mary Janes, and curly red wig, and,
Carol Channing-like, descends the staircase as the chorus of
servants serenades her with the title song. Says Meehan, “She
suddenly steps into a theatrical cartoon, as if we had invented
the comic strip for Harold Gray” (its creator). As the
plot progresses, it becomes less real, more metaphorical, finally
bursting into “Tomorrow.”
Meehan says the creative team had a minimum of spats. “People
on every show say, ‘We all got along,’ which is not
always true, but it was true on this show.” The major
headache he recalls was coping with all the little girls’
mothers - a bevy of fiercely protective Momma Roses. Whenever
a line was taken from one kid and given to another the rehearsal
mood would suddenly turn ugly. In one case, he recalls, one of
the mothers jumped out from behind a hedge and slugged the mother
of the other little girl.
Yet before the show even opened at Goodspeed there was dissension
within the ranks. Strouse mentions having a fiercer tug of wills
with Charnin the lyricist than he’d had working with Lee
Adams on “Bye Bye Birdie,” “Applause” and
“It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s Superman!”
Charnin, the former dancer, was more tightly wound than the easygoing
Adams. “Lee was much more amenable to criticism than
Martin,” Strouse writes in his 2008 autobiography. “The
discussions between Martin and me were a little more - what’s
the word? - ‘salty’?” The less competitive
Meehan, adds the composer, liked every tune Strouse came up with.
There was a major crisis among the generally tight-knit trio
when the show’s original producer, Michael Price, Goodspeed’s
artistic director, demanded a bigger name to stage the show.
Strouse also resisted Charnin’s assumption that he should
direct the show as well as write the lyrics, tilting the balance
of power. “It nearly sank the whole venture,”
Strouse writes. He wasn’t anti-Charnin’s direction,
he says. “I was worried that without a big-name director
we would never attract investors.” The first backers’
audition drew blank stares, he recalls, “not unlike the
empty eyeballs of the Harold Gray cartoon itself.”
Charnin, who had fanned the show into life, was hurt and horrified
by the idea of relinquishing the reins, but when Strouse agreed
with Price, the director agonizingly agreed to step aside (“It
killed me. It was a very painful decision, but I was so desperate
to get the show on I took off the director’s hat entirely”),
but only if one of three people agreed to direct it: Gower Champion,
Michael Kidd or Harold Prince, all of whom Charnin suspected
(and prayed) would say no. They all did. A power play then ensued:
If Strouse was still against him directing, the composer writes,
Charnin told him he was ready to pull out and find another composer,
whereupon Strouse blinked. Since none of the directors contacted
were interested, Charnin finally won back the show by default.
He steered “Annie’ to its next level, out of town previews
in Washington, where Nichols did flex his godfather producer’s
muscle. He insisted the show be staged at the Kennedy Center’s
more intimate Eisenhower Theater, which seats 1100, not the grandiose
Opera House that sits 2000. When Nichols was told by the Shubert
Organization that putting the show into the Eisenhower would
lose $110,000 a week, Nichols flatly told Shubert moguls Schoenfeld
and Bernard Jacobs, “In that case, we shall lose $110,000
a week.” The show opened at the Eisenhower Theater.
Ultimately, “Annie” cost $800,000
to mount, with about 30 investors, who soon earned back their
investment, with a final original profit of $20 million (its
failed sequel “Annie 2,” cost $7 million).
When the Broadway-bound musical opened in Washington, critics
were eager to see what Nichols & Co. had wrought from a moldy
cartoon character. In fact, after “Little Orphan Annie”’s
creator Harold Gray died in 1971, the strip continued but was
regarded as dreary and dated, in both its style and sensibility.
Gray was a fiercely conservative cartoonist who opposed the New
Deal and despised FDR. When Roosevelt was re-elected for his
third term in 1940, in protest Gray killed off Daddy Warbucks,
the swaggering war profiteer who adopts Annie; readers forced
Gray to bring the zillionaire back to life--he was later found
alive on a desert island.
(Gray’s heroine was inspired by a famous James Whitcomb
Riley poem, “Little Orphant [sic] Annie,” which he
turned into “Little Orphan Andy” but The Chicago
Tribune already had a strip about an orphan boy, so Gray
performed a sex-change operation and Andy became Annie. The strip
ran from 1932 to 1968; after Gray died, it was drawn by other
artists until 1974 before reverting to classic reruns.)
The great irony of the show--and probably its most inspired trick--is
that the plot’s politics are liberal, in stark contrast
to Gray’s. The musical turned Gray’s bald, blustering
conservative munitions-making tycoon into a warm-hearted pussycat
who is saved by the love of a good woman--Annie. As Charnin explains
the switch from comic strip history to theatrical fairy tale:
“When Roosevelt became president, Warbucks realized he
had to work with him in order to survive.” In the musical
they become mutual admirers. Warbucks, the rugged capitalist,
helps inspire the New Deal after FDR meets Annie, is infected
by her sunny spirit, and in return enlists J. Edgar Hoover to
find her lost parents. Somehow Meehan and Charnin made it all
seem perfectly logical.
The show did so well in Washington, where it became a hot ticket
among politicians, that it looked like theatrical prosperity
was just around the corner, at Broadway & 52nd Street, site
of the Alvin Theater. The pre-opening New York chatter was good.
Charnin learned that caricaturist Al Hirschfeld was coming to
a preview to sketch a Sunday drawing and Vogue wanted a photo
for its June edition to run with a mention of the show in its
“People Are Talking About…” column. Gallagher’s
Restaurant on 52nd Street was abuzz with excited pre-opening
babble. Charnin froze the show April 19 and it opened two nights
later to unanimous raves. Nichols sagely insisted that all the
first-night freebees go to people who had never seen the show,
guaranteeing a fresh reception.
By the time the show opened in New York, Charnin was down to
his last $2,000, which he spent on 70 opening-night gifts for
the company. Friends had loaned him money during the six-year
slog from conception to opening night, so he could keep renewing
the stage rights. He claims his last 60 cents went for newspapers
to read the glowing reviews. Charnin quickly heard from Richard
Rodgers, Alan Jay Lerner, and Jerry Herman, not just congratulating
him but thanking him for, as Charnin recalls it, “bringing
back the musical comedy” to America after being hijacked
by the English.
By the time “Annie” opened on Broadway, Walter Kerr
had changed from opening-night critic to Sunday critic and had
also changed his tune, writing, “An old legend is made
into a new one….We’re forthrightly invited to lose
our minds at the Alvin, and that--reluctantly at first, then
helplessly--is what we do.” Kerr, like FDR and every
curmudgeon who saw the show, had finally fallen under Annie’s
spell. He said the show had resolved its confused politics and
praised the tongue-in-cheek Nichols for not turning the show
into anything remotely satirical, or even camp (Loudon’s
snarling Miss Hannigan aside). “It doesn’t even
push for a calculated charm, which probably spares it coyness.
At heart it’s straight….open, expansive, opulent, innocent.”
Clive Barnes, the Times’s new first-night theater critic,
wrote: “To dislike ‘Annie’ would be tantamount
to disliking motherhood, peanut butter, friendly mongrel dogs,
and nostalgia. It also would be unnecessary, for ‘Annie’
is an intensely likable musical. You might even call it lovable,
it seduces one, and should settle down to being a sizable hit…It
has a rare kind of gutsy charm. It takes what could be the pure
dross of sentimentality and turns it into a musical of sensibility…The
Broadway musical was once celebrated all over the world for its
sheer efficiency. In recent years, this reputation has been somewhat
tarnished…[but ‘Annie’] is that rare animal--the
properly built, handsomely groomed Broadway musical.”
Martin Gottfried in The New York Post called it so “big,
warmhearted, funny and spirited” that it wasn’t
just innovative but “almost reactionary--a new old-fashioned
book show thoroughly, even brazenly, conventional, from structure
to style. Yet the damned thing works, and working is the theater’s
absolute excuse.” The Daily News’s Douglas
Watt said, “If there is such a thing as a kiddie show
for adults, then I suppose ‘Annie’ must be it.”
Few critics, oddly, made much mention of McArdle’s Annie.
When “Annie” first opened on Broadway, Martin Charnin
recalls, “There was a weird kind of reluctance”
among audiences to see it. “People thought it was a kids’
musical. But the decision we made that is responsible for why
it’s so successful is that it’s not a musical for children.
It’s a family show”--indeed, the family
show. Harold Prince advised Strouse during rehearsal: “Write
a children’s show that kids can bring their parents to,
and you may be OK. But write a grownup show that parents can
bring their children to, and you’ve got a smash hit."
Overnight, “Annie” became a cottage industry, with
mugs, dolls, lockets, towels, belts, key chains, and T-shirts
rolling off the trinket assembly line, long before gewgaws were
routinely hawked in musical theater lobbies. The famous retro
1940s’ Ovaltine shaker-up mugs were reproduced, depicting
the comic-strip Annie, who, as it happens, was not a blazing
redhead but a strawberry blonde in the Sunday funny pages and
the show logo. As final evidence of the show’s blockbuster
status, the sign outside the theater that read “ALVIN”
was replaced by “ANNIE,” the only time that’s
ever been done.
“Annie”
was a huge unlikely hit - a cheery musical based on a dreary,
dated, almost forgotten comic strip. During its heyday “Little
Orphan Annie” ran in 250 newspapers, became a radio show,
a comic book, a wildly popular 1936-`42 radio show titled just
“Orphan Annie” (sponsored by Ovaltine, which the program
put on the map with its famous shaker-upper mugs), plus two `30s’
movies, not to mention Little Orphan Annie watches, decoder badges
and rings, dolls and paper dolls, coloring books, games, jump
ropes, bubble-blowing and jacks sets.
Charnin, now 75, had grown up reading the strip and, as an art
major in college, was drawn to the strip’s graphics. “It
had vivid blacks and whites--the blacks were really black, the
whites really white, with a lot of texture to the drawings. I
wasn’t an ardent fan but I also liked that the balloons
has a lot of language in them. Harold Gray had a lot to say”--much
of it jingoistic, even anti-Semitic. Gray’s conservative
streak was a perfect fit for Tribune owner Col. Patterson’s
rightward world view. Charnin adds that it was “the first
serialized comic strip that had ever run in the Chicago Tribune.”
One of the interesting elements of the strip is that everybody
ages except Annie, who remained 11 for half a century; and of
course nobody in the strip has eyeballs.
The musical was ignited the day Charnin bought a coffee-table
collection of Little Orphan Annie strips, “The Life and
Hard Times of Little Orphan Annie,” for an artist friend
who liked the strip. It was to be a Christmas gift, but the gift-wrap
line was so long that Charnin decided to wrap the book himself,
took it home, opened it, and became so intrigued by Annie’s
adventures that he kept the anthology himself. “If you’re
in the business of writing musicals you have no idea where source
material can come from.”
He had been pondering a musical about a kid but figured “all
the good Dickens had been musicalized” - “Oliver
Twist,” “Pickwick,” and “A Christmas Carol.”
“Annie” would wind up as the American “Oliver!”
Charnin teased out a plot by devising a back story of Annie and
her benefactor Warbucks. “The one thing missing from
the strip was how these two got together. Gray had them arrive
in the story full-blown.”
He goes on, “As we began to develop the piece we realized
that cartoon musicals that didn’t live in the truth of reality
didn’t work” (although “Charlie Brown,”
“Li’l Abner” and “Superman” were solid
hits). It took Charnin and his team six months to breathe human
emotions into the cartoon characters. “We decided it
was a real love story between two orphans - one was 11½
and one was 55. The idea,” Charnin explains, “was
to tell the tale of how she gets left at the orphanage and is
found--to put eyeballs into those white eyes and make her real.”
The only characters from the strip he brought to the stage were
Annie, Oliver Warbucks, Sandy and Warbucks’s secretary Grace.
Two other continuing characters, Punjab (Warbucks’s turban-wearing
Indian aide) and The Asp, didn’t make the cut but were restored
in the movie version. In the show, Annie is not an actual orphan
but a foundling, allowing the tale to unwind about fake parents
who claim Warbucks’ $100,000 reward, on which the plot hinges.
It took 16 months to write the musical and another two years
searching for a place to put it on.
Charnin continues: “What was vitally important was to
retain the sense of optimism and spunk and energy that was rampant
throughout the entire piece. In all of her comic strip adventures
(each ran six weeks), Annie never lost her good humor and
optimistic spirit that everything was gonna turn out OK. That’s
basically the provocation for the lyrics to ‘Tomorrow,’”
which became the show’s theme and enduring anthem. Strouse
notes that at first the song was out of the range of most girls
who auditioned.
At first, both Meehan and Strouse thought it a wretched idea
for a musical. Charnin and Meehan had met while creating a TV
special with Anne Bancroft, and Charnin had said, “I’ll
bet you could write a book for a musical.” Meehan, a
New Yorker writer, had always wanted to write a musical. A year
later Charnin told him his idea for a show based on Little Orphan
Annie. “When he said musical, I was thinking ‘Gypsy’
and ‘My Fair Lady,” and this seemed too trivial. I
thought, Oh, it’s just another cartoony two-dimensional
thing,” says Meehan. “There’d been a musical
of ‘Li’l Abner’ I didn’t like. But when he
told me he’d lined up Charles Strouse, who had won two Tonys
[for “Bye Bye Birdie” and “Applause”], I
thought, Who am I to tell them to take a walk? I’d better
get involved in this.”
Meehan plowed through 30 years of Little Orphan Annie strips
at The New York Daily News, reporting to Charnin, “There’s
nothing there but the richest man in the world and a little girl
and a dog. But I’d read a lot of Dickens and I thought,
‘Let me see what I can do with this.’ He realized it
was an American “Oliver Twist.” [Critic] John Simon,
who disliked the show, called it “’Oliver’
in drag.”
“I took that as a compliment,” says Meehan. But Simon later wrote of an “Annie”
revival, “What cannot be denied is that the songs are
wonderfully varied, highly original, and uniformly pleasurable.”
Meehan recalls, “It wasn’t until a month after I
wrote it that I realized, ‘Oh, my God, I’ve written
Cinderella again!’ Cinderella can be told over and over
again - ‘My Fair Lady,’ for instance, or another show
I did, ‘Hairspray,’ which is also Cinderella, only
that time I realized it.”
“Annie”
went on to run 2,377 performances, the third longest running
Broadway show of the 1970s. McArdle, the youngest performer in
a musical ever nominated for a Tony, wasn’t in it all that
long. She was 14 when she finally left in March 1978 to open
the London version but played it there only 40 performances,
forced by Actors Equity to relinquish it for a British actress.
The London show ran 1,485 performances, then opened around the
world and began a national tour that ran three and a half years.
When a 2006 six-week revival at Madison Square Garden broke house
records, even the cynical John Simon was disarmed by “Annie,”
praising its “eternal basic values” and “wonderfully
varied, highly original, uniformly pleasurable songs.”
Forgetting the show’s unabashed sentimentality, it’s
hard not to succumb to the show’s innate charm, the result
of some unusually deft theatrical craftsmanship.
“Annie” cried out for a sequel, and there were two,
both of which failed to beguile audiences. The first, in 1993,
was the disastrous “Annie 2: Miss Hannigan’s Revenge,”
mainly about Hannigan, not Annie, a fatal mistake. It closed
at the Kennedy Center Opera House after 36 performances. Variety
wrote: “Almost every ingredient that made ‘Annie’
such a delight for both children and adults is missing”
from this “fancily dressed but greatly irritating show.”
One critic noted, “The [original] was so flawless and
complete that it made successful sequels unnecessary.”
“What we were writing was almost
a send-up of our original show,”
reflects Meehan. “I remember seeing all these parents
bringing their little girls in pretty dresses to see ‘Annie
2,’ and all they saw was this mean woman singing about wanting
to kill a kid. Loudon was good, the numbers were good, but the
audience wasn’t buying it.”
Before “Annie 2” opened, Meehan had said, “It’s
a risky enterprise. A lot of people say we’re just trying
to cash in.” Fifteen minutes into the out-of-town show
in Washington, D.C., noted a reporter following its progress,
“they all knew something was wrong--too much Miss Hannigan
and very little Annie.” Charnin conceded, “There
were 700 children in the audience who could not care less about
this un-Annied Annie, who came to re-experience or experience
for the first time, this mythological show.” Strouse
said later, “I did not want to do this show. I didn’t
want this to be a piece that was just an expression of greed.”
The “Annie” brain trust later retooled “Annie
2” at Goodspeed and turned it into a new, warmer show, “Annie
Warbucks,” about the further adventures of Annie (salvaging
a few songs from “Annie 2”), which had a brief perfunctory
off- Broadway run. The first show was about Annie finding a father,
Daddy Warbucks, and “Annie Warbucks” is about Annie
finding a mother, Warbucks’s secretary Grace.
Few musicals have had such a lingering afterlife, including a
song-less (except for “Tomorrow”) TV sequel and a disastrous
1982 TV movie entitled “Annie: A Royal Adventure!,”
with Joan Collins as Miss Hannigan and George Hearn as Daddy
Warbucks. Wikipedia yields countless pop references to
“Annie” -- from “Austin Powers: Goldmember”
to “Reefer Madness,” in which FDR says, “A little
orphan girl once told me that the sun would come out tomorrow…”).
In “30 Rock,” Tina Fey’s character is heard singing
along to “Maybe” on her headset. “'Tomorrow' --
originally intended just to cover a scene change--pops up in
films and TV shows as diverse as “You’ve Got Mail,”
“Dave,” “The Drew Carey Show,” “Ally
McBeal,” “Friends,” “Shrek II,” “Ugly
Betty,” “Addams Family Values,” and in John Waters’s
black comedy “Serial Mom.”
A double 2008 CD encapsulates much of the show’s history,
with cut songs from the original score plus numbers from “Annie
II,” using a medley of Annies, Warbuckses, and Hannigans
(Carol Burnett, Kathy Bates, Nell Carter, Sally Struthers, Kathie
Lee Gifford). The Hannigan role was always easier to cast than
Annie, and several aging actresses have struck career-reviving
gold with it--Alice Ghostley, Betty Hutton, and June Havoc on
stage, Bates on TV, and Burnett on film.
Like McArdle, Charnin
remains grafted at the hip to “Annie.” Late last year
he was back directing the latest leg of the show’s 30th
anniversary tour, still wandering America after 32 years; as
each Annie outgrows the part, a new one needs to be trained.
The current tour will play through July 2009. “Annie”
is revived more than any other musical today, Charnin maintains.
A spokesman at MTI, the show’s licenser, verifies it but
can’t provide exact figures. “It’s definitely
one of our top shows, along with ‘Guys and Dolls,’
‘Fiddler,’ and Disney’s ‘High School Musical,’”
he said. “Charnin would know--he gets the checks.”
“Annie” has helped keep many a small theater company
solvent. Charnin observes, “Whenever a regional theater
has a season and October comes around and they look at their
books and say, ‘We’ve had a pretty crappy season doing
God-knows-what,’ they book ‘Annie’ from November
to January and save their season.”
It may be the politically opportune moment for “Annie”’s
Broadway return. “Annie came along at just the right
time,” says Charnin. “I’m convinced that
musicals of spunk and spirit and optimism are always written
in Republican administrations and produced in Democratic administrations.”
If so, we can look forward to another “Annie” in the
next few years. Charnin adds, “When ‘Annie’
opened at Goodspeed, we were coming out of a really spectacularly
terrible decade”--1967-1977, which had produced the
Vietnam War, Watergate, assassinations, and racial and feminist
turmoil. “Tom, Charles, and I were all serious optimists.
If you’re in the theater you kind of have to be.”
During the show’s Washington run, the local papers and Time
magazine noted that “Annie” had caught the political
temper of the times, “helping to salve our Watergate
wounds,” in Time’s phrase. “We were
a cynical nation then,” says Charnin.
Meehan comments now: “I think it
might be ripe again for a major revival because of the mood of
the country.” Especially now that Daddy Warbucks (George
W. Bush) has left town and an FDR figure (Barack Obama) has moved
in; indeed, a post-election November issue of Time depicted
Obama as FDR with a top hat, cigarette holder, and big grin.
Meehan suspects that the current financial hard times and grim
national mood are ripe for a show set in the Depression with
a “Yes we can” heroine.
Charnin says he’s not eager for another New York revival.
“I’m not lying awake nights dreaming of bringing
it back to Broadway. I don’t think it belongs on Broadway.
I think it belongs in the country. Broadway has changed. It doesn’t
need revivals, it needs new things. I don’t think it’s
necessary. ‘Annie’ exists in its own world and has
a great life beyond Broadway.”
And it isn’t that it’s too sentimental for the times.
“It’s not sentimental,” he insists. “It’s
a good history lesson. A lot of people don’t know about
the Depression or who FDR was. On the road now, it resonates
the same way it did in the `70s. It’s sort of come full
circle. The political jokes work better now than before.”
The movie and TV versions of “Annie” cut its two political
songs--the sardonic “We Want to Thank You, Herbert Hoover”
and “We Want a New Deal for Christmas.” McArdle thinks
the reason was “to make it more kid friendly, which is
so silly because it’s a great part of history and that’s
a huge history lesson. I was so perturbed when they did that.
My God, they’re the best scenes in the show!”
The flat flop 1982 film version fatally lacked McArdle’s
oomph. It was directed by (nobody knows why) an aging John Huston,
doing his first musical. But even the charmless Hollywood version,
which cut six songs from the score, failed to tarnish the stage
show’s reputation. “It was wrong-headed from the
beginning,” says Charnin. “John Huston had no
right to direct it. It wasn’t ‘Treasure of Sierra Madre.’
He was old and infirm. I have no idea why they chose him. We
sold it for nine million bucks and that was our mistake. Because
of the money, we gave up total artistic control of the piece
and turned it over to people who didn’t know how to do it.
It happens all the time. Hollywood always thinks they can do
it better than the people who created it.”
Like most critics and the public, McArdle disliked the movie
of “Annie.”
“The girl who got the lead, Aileen
Quinn”--like the originally miscast Annie at Goodspeed--“was
Shirley Temple, which is exactly what Annie isn’t! They
had to cast someone who was scruffy and Quinn had none of that.
She was all outwardly affected, but a great little dancer; her
voice had no vibrato.”
McArdle also was irked by the 30th anniversary production of
“Annie” that played Madison Square garden in 2006.
Kathie Lee Gifford was Miss Hannigan (The New York Times
critic wrote, “She mugs her way through the role, as
if she were doing a comedy skit with Regis Philbin”).
“It insults me they’d do something
like that," says McArdle. "To
me, the one person who should play Hannigan is Sandra Bernhardt
- she’d be fabulous. Or Rosie O’Donnell.”
There was an earlier 20th anniversary revival on Broadway in
1997 with Nell Carter as Miss Hannigan that ran 293 performances.
The last time the original Annie saw “Annie” was at
a grade school in McArdle’s neighborhood. “They
invited me to come and I saw a little black girl play Annie who
was probably the best one I’ve seen do it in 10 years. If
I had the money I’d love to produce an all-black version
of ‘Annie.’ I shouldn’t say this but I’ve
been so terribly disappointed with a lot of productions of Annie
I’ve seen.”
A highly praised 1999 TV version, directed and choreographed
by Rob Marshall with Kathy Bates, Alan Cumming, Victor Garber,
Audra MacDonald, and Alicia Morton as a sweet, subdued but believable
Annie, is everything the movie should have been, almost as rich
as David Lean’s “Oliver!” McArdle herself makes
a special appearance, bursting on screen out of nowhere to sing
a rousing chorus of “NYC” in that effortless belt that
makes instantly clear she could easily hold her own in any movie
musical today, if there were any today. Morton lacked McArdle’s
dynamism but has her own quietly spunky spirit. “The
TV version was nothing like the Broadway production,”
says Annie #1. “A voice like mine would’ve been
overpowering on the small screen.”
Last year, a TV documentary chronicled what became of several
of the girls who played orphans in “Annie.” “Life
after Tomorrow,” directed by Gil Cates Jr. and former “Annie”
orphan Julie Stevens, zeroes in on how the girls were affected
by the show and, in one critic’s remarks, “the cold
slap of reality once their time in the limelight was over…One
day, poof it’s gone--the lights, ovations, media coverage,
White House trips. The only thing left behind is real life, with
its judgmental attitude.”
Some girls had trouble adjusting, others remain haunted by the
experience, very few went on to grownup theater careers, but
every girl who played the show was marked forever by it. One
of them says that, after outgrowing the role, “I left
a part of my soul behind.” Broadway’s No. 3 Annie,
Sarah Jessica Parker, has only rosy memories. Others who appear
include Kristin Vigard, Joanna Pacitti, Allison Smith, Molly
Ringwold (in a West Coast production), and Danielle Brisebois,
the tiniest Broadway orphan in “Annie.”
Conspicuously absent from the documentary are McArdle and the
movie’s Annie, Aileen Quinn. McArdle hated the documentary’s
negative spin--that the show had traumatized the girls who were
in it, not at all Andrea’s experience. Many girls discuss
how it felt to shine briefly at the center of the Broadway universe
only to be rudely discarded when they blossomed into adolescents.
One girl begged to bind her budding breasts if she could stay
in the show.
The original orphans were a diverse group, all shapes and sizes
and psyches, with varying, often un-rosy, memories--from being
sent disturbing mail from fans and pedophiles to breaking up
homes to feeling neglected by lax backstage tutors who looked
the other way. The kids often played hooky at the decadent disco
Studio 54 two blocks away from the theater. “I don’t
know what we were doing there,” recalls Sarah Jessica
Parker. April Lerner adds, “We had no education at all.
We’d go to a hotel room and watch ‘Gilligan’s
Island.’ My tutor was in the bathroom getting high most
of the time.”
McArdle says, “The woman who did the film, Julie Stephens,
was in a road company ‘Annie’ and never did anything
after that. I knew what she was going to do--that it was going
to be a bitch fest, about how ‘Annie’ wrecked their
careers and now look at how bad off they all are. As if one show
would owe anyone a career. It was so insane. I said to `em, Can’t
be bought, can’t be tempted--no, sorry. Aileen Quinn didn’t
do it because I didn’t, and for the same reason, I would
assume. My friend Shelley Bruce, who took over the show from
me, isn’t in it either. All the girls who had good experiences
were going to be edited out.” McArdle didn’t want
to be dumped into the same discard bin as other unhappy ex-orphans.
No hard-knock life for her.
(CONTINUED NEXT WEEK)
©2009 by Gerald Nachman. This column first posted June 8, 2009.
TO ACCESS GERALD NACHMAN'S ARCHIVE OF COLUMNS ON THIS SITE, CLICK HERE: NACHMAN ARCHIVE.
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