When Martin Charnin wrote the lyrics of Annie in 1971, he was out of step with the era. Musicals were beginning to be self-conscious and ‘knowing’, spoofing their own sentimentality, camp and sophisticated. Annie was quite unashamedly old-fashioned and sentimental. Based on a long-running comic strip about a courageous little orphan, it was Charnin’s avowed attempt to counteract the grim mood of the time, ‘a direct metaphorical response,’ he wrote, ‘to Nixon, to Vietnam, to the results and disappointments of the 60s, to the terrible sense of what Jimmy Carter ultimately called the malaise that existed in the country.’ The musical, first produced in 1977, was an amazing success, and is still constantly performed; which shows that there is still a taste for retro sentimentality.
      Not that Annie is just apple-pie. The orphan girls and their drunken guardian, Miss Hannigan; the down-and-outs and their desperate struggle to survive; Miss Hannigan’s criminal brother and his ruthless attempts to get rich; “Daddy” Warbucks’ confession about his own more successful ruthlessness, are all intrinsic to the plot, presumably intended to salt the sentimentality and grit the gooiness. The difficulty for any director is to get the right balance between the purported realism of these tough bits and the upbeat sparkliness of the rest – a considerable difficulty and one that Chris Moreno’s production at the Richmond Theatre doesn’t quite pull off. It seems unable to decide whether it is going to play Annie straight, or satirise and camp it up. Su Pollard’s Miss Hannigan was a brilliant portrayal of an embittered, randy old lush. Her part-sexy, part-alcoholic jiggles were obscene and horrifyingly convincing. But alongside this we were supposed to believe in a cute little eleven year-old redhead who brightened the lives of the master and servants in a palatial New York house – or were we? With an atrocious wig, and such overweening confidence, maybe this production’s Annie (Ellen Gallagher on the night I saw it) was meant to be an indictment of spoilt American childhood. At any rate, I never really warmed to her, although she had terrific presence and danced fabulously.
      The dancing and razzmatazz were the best parts of the show, and it really came alive in the Warbucks residence, where the maids and manservants danced with grace, vitality and humour, and “Daddy” (David McAlister), despite the tremendous difficulty of bringing off this role in our paedophile-fearful age, was a completely persuasive mixture of cool ambition and love waiting to be, and then actually, tapped. But as a whole this Annie was uneven, with tough realism and arch sexiness grating against schmaltz, and occasional facetiousness embarrassingly grating against both. There was no overall conceptual scheme, which is what is desperately needed if Annie, an anomaly in the late seventies, and even more anomalous now, is to move and inspire us as lyricist Martin Charnin intended it to.
J. O’Grady