Theatre in Review: Annie (Palace Theater)

	Lilla Crawford with Sunny, the dog. Photo: Joan Marcus

There's nothing like professionalism, a quality the current revival of Annie has in spades. None of the blemishes affecting modern musical theatre are present: there's no overbearing spectacle, no score borrowed from yesterday's hit parade. Thomas Meehan's libretto is literate, funny, and carefully constructed, trusting that the audience will get, and enjoy, jokes about the likes of Harold Ickes and Harpo Marx. Charles Strouse's score is a kind of hit parade of pop styles, circa 1933. There's a bitter comic ballad, set to a Kurt Weill downbeat, for a chorus of Hooverville dwellers, a bouncy Rudy Vallee ode to staying on the sunny side of life, and some raucous barrelhouse blues for a trio of schemes looking for a shortcut to easy street. And where else can you see Franklin Roosevelt and his cabinet belting out an anthem to optimism?

It's always been easy to patronize this 1976 blockbuster, with its parade of cute orphans and the fiendishly unforgettable melody of "Tomorrow;" seen from the perspective of today, when skill and creativity in the musical theatre are in such short supply, Annie now seems like a miracle of craft. Everyone involved knew what they wanted to do, and they did it. Is it a bit mechanical at times? Maybe, but oh, how the machinery hums.

In fact, Annie is something of a marvelous balancing act, pleasing children and adults alike and keeping sentiment and humor (both high and low) in perfect equipoise all night long. And, at a time when musicals spend most of their energy slavishly imitating the films from which they were drawn, it's a delight to see how the show's creators took a famous property -- Harold Gray's long-running comic strip -- and used it as the basis for smart and wholly original entertainment. Thanks to a couple of bum revivals, it's been easy to forget that Annie had any of these qualities at all, but, in the right hands, it can still sparkle. The current edition, directed with brisk efficiency by James Lapine, is -- with one glaring exception -- in very good hands indeed.

Finding the right girl to play Annie is, of course, all-important, and Lapine and company have lucked out with that tiny tower of power Lilla Crawford; armed with a penetrating New York accent and a powerful right cross, she makes a strong, scrappy orphan, belting like a baby Merman one moment and melting your heart the next. She has an ideal leading man in Anthony Warlow, who, as Daddy Warbucks, fully taps into the comedy of a starchy billionaire whose self-absorption is undermined by Annie's charm and the exigencies of the New Deal. (Planning a dinner party for Roosevelt, he orders his secretary, "Grace, find out what Democrats eat.") He is also the most vocally gifted Daddy Warbucks I've ever encountered, spinning vocal gold out of ballads like "Something was Missing," and cutting loose with the vaudevillian hijinks of "I Don't Need Anything But You." There are also lovely contributions from Brynn O'Malley, as the efficient, quietly love-struck Grace, and Merwin Foard, as Franklin Roosevelt, who, with every patrician vowel in place, gleefully urges his cabinet to get up and sing. And Sunny, the dog, makes an excellent Sandy.

The only ringer in the cast -- and, unfortunately, it's a major one -- is Katie Finneran, as Miss Hannigan, the boozy old bag who runs the orphanage, maintaining a reign of terror against Annie and her friends. The role is a tricky proposition: Play it too straight, and she's odious, a child abuser; go too far over the top and you rip the show's light comedy fabric. Dorothy Loudon, who created the role, was a certified wild woman and a specialist in the comedy of desperation; there aren't many like her anymore -- in truth, there never were -- and casting Miss Hannigan today is a daunting proposition. (I've seen Alice Ghostley, who underplayed riotously, and Nell Carter, who was grimly unfunny, a monster from a Dickens novel.) Finneran has been a reliable laugh-getter, playing carefully stylized dumb-blonde types in the likes of Noises Off and Promises, Promises, but, even outfitted with a fright wig and hideously patterned frocks, she is too young and attractive to embody the past-her-prime boozehound that Meehan wrote. Her big number, "Little Girls," is a gem of deadpan humor that slowly builds to a frenzied conclusion; Finneran attacks the lyrics from the top with an array of funny voices and vocal tricks, killing the humor altogether. "Easy Street," in which she plots with her con-man brother, Rooster (a solid Clark Thorell) and his vacant girlfriend, Lily (J. Elaine Marcos), suffers from a similar lack of discipline, especially as overstaged by the choreographer, Andy Blankenbuehler. (Elsewhere, Blankenbuehler's staging niftily folds tap breaks and waltz steps into the action, underlining the show's lively pace.)

The action unfolds across a '30s New York cityscape that appears to be in perpetual motion, thanks to David Korins' clever scenic design. A tangle of laundry lines flies out and the orphanage where Annie and her friends are ensconced whirls around and splits open, revealing a squalid little dormitory -- one of the orphans sleeps in a drawer! -- overshadowed by an intimidating staircase. The first floor of Warbucks' mansion is constructed like a book, with turning pages that reveal the reception hall, library, bathroom, and art gallery (amusingly populated with a gallery of instantly recognizable masterpieces.) The visual surprises are endless: a black sedan keeps growing until it becomes a stage-spanning limousine; a glittering chandelier lowers from above, turning into a shiny Christmas tree. The one disappointment is the radio station scene, where Warbucks initiates the search for Annie's birth parents; the production settles for an "on air" sign and a set of Viennese curtains, making the whole thing seem like an afterthought; otherwise, Korins has finally provided Annie with a sparkling new look. Susan Hilferty's costumes match boxy men's suits and servants' uniforms, starched with military precision, with tattered orphans' rags and the flouncy, filmy, many-layered look of early-'30s couture. Wendall K. Harrington's projection work includes two Depression-era newsreels designed to bring younger audiences up to speed about the horrific details of life during that era. This may be nitpicking, but Harrington is such a famously exacting artist that I will note that the Universal-International logo used in the newsreel dates from late '40s, rather than the early '30s; otherwise, her contribution adds a great deal of flavor to the proceedings. Brian Ronan's well-balanced sound design is remarkably clear, especially given that the Palace is an acoustically challenging house and a number of the songs are sung by a chorus of little girls with not-great diction.

In any case, this Annie has the charm of a vintage Paramount screwball comedy packed with high-stepping songs and dances. It's an object lesson in how to provide a family entertainment that also keeps the adults happy. As you might expect, it is drawing plenty of family audiences, which is very good news. It should provide the younger attendees with an object lesson in the pleasures of the book musical form -- and maybe it will teach them to accept no substitutes.--David Barbour