Annie Live! (Chloe Productions, Sony Pictures Television, Universal Television, aired December 21, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The musical Annie was written by Martin Charnin, Charles Strouse and Thomas Meehan based on a comic strip created by Harold Gray in the 1920’s. No doubt it became a wish-fulfillment fantasy in the Depression era (the musical is set in 1933, the first year of Franklin D,.Roosevelt’s Presidency, and FDR actually appears as a character in the musical) – though the title and the character come from, an 1890’s poem by James Whitcomb Dr.Rlley called “Little Orphant Annie” (the spelling is ann attempt to reproduce the dialect pronunciation of the central character), an impossibly good little-two-shoes who warns the children of the parents who’ve taken her in, “The Gobble-uns ‘ll git you ef you don’t watch out!” If you get the impression that the musical is a work of cloying sweetness destined to give any reasonably sensitive viewer mental diabetes, you’d be right. The musical was inexplicably a Broadway mega-hit in 1977 and gave its child star, Andrea McArdle, her 15 minutes of fame (though the only other thing I remember her for is a 1979 TV-movie called Rainbow based on the early life of Judy Garland, in which McArdle was hopelessly miscast: McArdle’s was still a little girl’s voice, whereas what originally impressed people about Judy Garland was that even when she was 12 she sang with the power, range and depth of an adult woman). The show got made into a movie in 1982 and, like some other film versions of huge Broadway hits (including A Chorus Line and Cats), it was a major box-office flop. When its producer, industry veteran Ray Stark, announced that he was so proud of it “this is the movie I want on my tombstone,” one snippy critic responded, “Funeral services are being held at a theatre near you.”

I saw the 1982 Annie decades ago on a network TV showing on an old black-and-white TV, and the only thing I can remember about it with any fondness was the full-blooded and marvelous performance by Carol Burnett as the piece’s villain, orphanage manager Miss Hannigan, and an exciting chase scene at the end as Miss Hannigan’s minions try to recover her from her benefactor and foster-father, ultra-rich tycoon Oliver “Daddy” Warbucks, who’s taken her in from the orphanage and given her a life of luxury. The plot deals with Annie’s miserable life at the orphanage, her determination to escape – which she does twice, the second time falling in with a group of homeless Depression victims with whom she sings the best song in the score, “We’d Like to Thank You, Herbert Hoover.” This production decided to go for cross-racial casting and made both Annie (Celina Smith) and Miss Hannigan (Taraji P. Henson) Black; one imdb.com reviewer got into a hissy-fit over Annie being Black but I liked Smith’s performance and she even made Annie’s famous hit song, “Tomorrow,” more tolerable than usual (and, praise be, the writers at least get this piece of sugar-coated shit over with early). As with NBC’s previous live telecasts of musicals, the most impressive aspect of Annie Live! (as they rather clunkily called it) was the chorus dancing: the ensemble they got to play Annie’s fellow orphans is really fine and the ones playing Warbucks’ domestic staff are almost as spectacular.

My problem with Annie is the basic material, which is not only sappily sweet and cloying but badly dated as well: when Warbucks shows up at the orphanage and demands they give him an orphan to spend two weeks in his home over the Christmas holidays, a 2021 audience is going to assume, “Oh, he wants a child he can sexually abuse.” And when he expresses disappointment when Annie arrives and turns out to be a girl – he says, “I thought all orphans were boys” – I thought, “Oh, he’s more Michael Jackson than Jeffrey Epstein.” The first half of Annie at least has a certain appeal – the orphan’s song “It’s a Hard-Knock Life,” though clearly a np-off of “Food, Glorious Food” from Lionel Bart’s 1960’s musical Oliver! (a work Annie owes quite a lot more to than is generally recognized), has an appealing scrappiness about it. But once Annie enters the Warbucks home the show turns flat and dull, and I couldn’t help but make invidious comparisons to a bunch of classic films actually made in the 1930’s – Frank Capra’s Lady for a Day (1933) and It Happened One Night (1934), Gregory La Cava’s My Man Godfrey (1936) and, perhaps closest of all, Henry Koster’s One Hundred Men and a Girl (1937) – that dramatized the clash between the super-rich and the super-poor (heightened by the virtual disappearance of a middle class) far, far better than Annie did. I just got worn down not only by the sentimentality of the material but its utter predictability; when Miss Hannigan, her (Black) brother and (white) sister-in-law plot to pass off the couple as Annie’s real parents (for whom Warbucks, played by Harry Connick, Jr. in a bald pate that makes him look like Lex Luthor in yet another Superman reboot, has offered a $50,000 reward), Warbucks’ investigators all too easily expose them and the plot ends with Warbucks adopting Annie and leaving his long-suffering assistant, Grace Farrell (the racially ambiguous Nicole Scherzinger, whose jazz number, “Annie,” shows her to have the best singing voice in the cast), out in the cold. I was hoping Warbucks would propose to her, not only because she’s clearly been in unrequited love with him all through the show but on the logical ground that Annie needs a mother as well as a father – but no such luck