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"The Story of Annie"
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by Thomas Meehan
Or course, we might in theory have done a musical of almost anything-Madame Bovary, for instance, or the life of Millard Fillmore. Burt Charles Strouse, Martin Sharnin and I chose instead to write a musical - ANNIE - based on "Little Orphan Annie", Harld Gray's classic American comic strip. Of all things, however, why "Little Orphan Annie"? Well, I'll tell you.
The stroy of the creation of ANNIE began more than five years ago, shortly before Christmas of 1971, when Martin Charnin, a Broadway lyricist was browsing a midtown Manhattan bookstore. He was looking to buy a Chirstmas gift for a friend when his eye chanced to fall upon a comic strip collection entitled LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE: HER LIFE AND HARD TIMES. His friend had an interest in popular culture and so Charnin decided to buy it for him. But the friend ended up getting an entirely different gift, for Charnin read the book when he got back home and excitedly decided to keep it for himself.
A couple of weeks later, in early January 1972, the phone rang in my home in Sherman, Connecticut. martin Charnin was calling. He had an idea for a musical that he wanted me to write the book for and he wondered if I could come into New York to talk about it with him. "Of course," I said, and three days later I was sitting across the desk from him in his office on West 57th Street.
I'd known Charnin since 1970, when he'd created, directed and produced and Anne Bancroft television special called, "Annie, the Women in the Life of a Man," for which I'd written a sketch based on a short story I'd earlier published in the New Yorker. And as a result of working together on the special we'd become friends. Now, as I sat ready to hear that he wanted to make a musical of, say, Shaw's Pygmalion of the short stories of Sholom Aleichem, he told me his idea: Little Orphan Annie. Today, I have absolutely no trouble remembering my initial reaction to the idea: "Ughh, I hate it."
Ever since I'd been taken as a child to my first Broadway show, Arsenic and Old Lace, in 1940, I'd been hopelessly stagestruck, and had long yearned to be involved in the New York theatre. Indeed, I'd written a couple of unproduced plays while making my living as a writer for magazines, especially the New Yorker, and as an occasional contributor of comic sketches to television. But as mush as I wanted to write for the theatre I could summon up virtually no interest in a musical based on "Little Orphan Annie" or any other comic strip.
But it wasn't a comic-strip musical that he had in mind, Charnin explained, but merely one that happened to be based on a comic strip. What had drawn him to Little Orphan Annie, Charnin said, was the almost mythic character of Annie herself. And as we talked further about the idea, I began gradually to see what Charnin had recognized in the comic strip - i.e., that Little Orphan Annie - the child of indomitable spriit, lost and wandering-could stand as a metaphor for courage, morality, innocence and optimism in the face of cynicism and pessimism. At the time, the araly days of 1972, Richard Nicon was in the White House, the Vietnam war was still going on, the country was in the middle of a deep economic depression and an enormouse number of Americans were overwhelmed by a sense of distrust and hopelessness. Now, as I grew to be as enthusiastic about the idea as Charnin was, I saw that a musical based on "Little Orphan Annie" could speak out in favor of hope and against despair. We could set the musical in New York City during the Depression, I suggested, and thus it would echo the hard times that so many Americans were going through in the early 1970's. Okay, I finally agreed, I'd like to take a crack at writing the book of the musical but did Charnin have acomposer in mind? "Yes", he said, "Charles Strouse".
I'd never met Strouse, but I was familiar with his work, of course, for he'd written the music for a number of highly successful Broadway musicals, including Bye Bye Birdie, Golden Boy and Applause. And Charnin and Strouse, I knew, had been friends for fourteen years, ever since they'd met while involved in a Broadway revue entitled The Boys Against the Girls, in which Charnin was a performer and for which Strouse did the vocal arrangements. While working together on The Boys Against the Girls, Charnin and STrouse had vowed some day to write a musical together. And, now, Charnin felt, the time had come.
"When will you talk to Strouse about the idea?" I asked. "I alaready have," said Charnin with a grin, "and he wants to do it." I learned from Strouse that he had also said, "Ughh" when he'd first heard the idea, but then grew to like it partly because his mother had forbidden him as a child to read comic strips and comic books and so, or course, he'd been an obsessive reader of them on the sly. In consequence, he had a deep familiarity with and an affinity for "Little Orphan Annie". "Besides," he later pointed out to me, "a comic strip is an ideal basis for a musical comedy because they are similar forms of popular American culture. That is , both deal in broad strokes, telling simple stories in as few words as possible."
The three of us began working on the musical that was to become ANNIE in February 1972, but because of various other projects that each of us was involved in, we didn't complete it until the summer of 1973. And then, since writing a musical is a good deal easier than finding someone to put up the money to produe it, ANNIE didin't make it to the stage until summer 1976, when it had a ten-week tryout at the Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam, Connecticut. Among those who chanced tto see it in Connecticut was Mike Nichols, who immediately became the shows most enthusiastic fan. And, indeed, Nichols diecded with ANNIE to become a producer for the first time in his career. So, directed by Martin Charnin and produced by Mike Nichols in association with his long-time frined and business partner, Lewis Allen, plus Roger L. Stevens, James Nederlander, Stephen R. Friedman, and Irwin Meyer, ANNIE opened at the Alvin Theatre in New York on April 21, 1977 following a five-week tryout at the Kennedy Center.
Paradoxically, a funny thing happened to America between the time we set to work on ANNIE and the time that is is at last arriving on Broadway. We wrote the musical as a reaction to the Nixonian America of 1972, but now, with the Vietnam war ended, the economy on the upswing, and James Earl Carter in the White House, the message of hope in ANNIE is no longer antithetical to the mood of the country but is instead a mirror of it. And I have no idea whether this is going to prove to be good or bad for ANNIE. Nor, at this writing, do I ahve any idea whether or not the story of ANNIE that began when Martin Charnin wandered into that bookstore, will have a happy ending.
By chance, all three of the creators of ANNIE have young gaughters, but each of us now looks fondly on ANNIE as a kind of second daughter. And we're hoping that she'll do for us what daughters are supposed to do for their fathers-support us in our old age.
From PLAYBILL Magazine.
© 1977 American Theatre Press
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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