I saw the traveling Broadway production of Annie at the Fischer Theatre in Detroit when I was in the 4th grade.
My parents bought me the Broadway Cast album for my tenth birthday.
Singing is my favorite healing modality and I have learned it is Cheaper than Therapy.
Jenny Hatch
PS In my 5th and 6th grade school photos I am wearing my Annie costume. That show was my whole identity during those years!
A clip from Broadway World.
The original production of ANNIE had its world premiere on Aug 10, 1976 at the Goodspeed Opera House (Michael J. Price, Executive Director) and opened on Broadway on April 21, 1977 at the Alvin Theatre (Neil Simon theatre). It went on to win the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Musical, seven Drama Desk Awards including Best Musical, the Grammy for Best Cast Show Album and seven Tony Awards including Best Musical, Best Book (Thomas Meehan) and Best Score (Charles Strouse, Martin Charnin).
It closed on Broadway after playing 2,377 performances. ANNIE was revived on Broadway in 1997 and again in 2014. It has been made into a film three times (1982, 1999, 2014) and was most recently featured as a live television production on NBC. The show remains one of the biggest Broadway musical hits ever; it has been performed in 28 languages and has been running somewhere around the world for 45 years.
I most recently auditioned for Boulder Dinner Theatres production of Annie. I tried out for Miss Hannigan.
Thoughts on Taxpayer Funding of the Arts!
Jenny and Jeff Hatch in our Finale costumes
Jenny and Jeff in our Hooverville costumes
In the green room with the guys. Jeff in his Bundles costume.
I wrote a couple of blog posts about a 2013 production that my son and I participated in when we lived in Utah.
Quotes from these posts are below…
I was talking to one of the Moms before our closing performance last night. She is also a Homeschooler and very educated about political ideology and controversies. She had no idea how political the stage show was and used her girls performing as orphans in the show as an opportunity to have her teenage children conduct some research on FDR and his New Deal and what it did to the American People during the depression.
Many historians refer to the depression that occurred in 1921 as being just as devastating as the stock market crash that hit in 1929. And some historians claim that FDR’s New Deal extended the depression by a decade.
“In order to make sure that this version of events sticks, little, if any, public mention is ever made of the depression of 1920–1921. And no wonder — that historical experience deflates the ambitions of those who promise us political solutions to the real imbalances at the heart of economic busts.
The conventional wisdom holds that in the absence of government counter cyclical policy, whether fiscal or monetary (or both), we cannot expect economic recovery — at least, not without an intolerably long delay. Yet the very opposite policies were followed during the depression of 1920–1921, and recovery was in fact not long in coming.
The economic situation in 1920 was grim. By that year unemployment had jumped from 4 percent to nearly 12 percent, and GNP declined 17 percent. No wonder, then, that Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover — falsely characterized as a supporter of laissez-faire economics — urged President Harding to consider an array of interventions to turn the economy around. Hoover was ignored.
Instead of “fiscal stimulus,” Harding cut the government’s budget nearly in half between 1920 and 1922. The rest of Harding’s approach was equally laissez-faire. Tax rates were slashed for all income groups. The national debt was reduced by one-third.
The Federal Reserve’s activity, moreover, was hardly noticeable. As one economic historian puts it, “Despite the severity of the contraction, the Fed did not move to use its powers to turn the money supply around and fight the contraction.”[2] By the late summer of 1921, signs of recovery were already visible. The following year, unemployment was back down to 6.7 percent and it was only 2.4 percent by 1923.”
As I talked to Barbara about the assumptions of the show and how the original cartoonist who created the Little Orphan Annie strip was a free market conservative who would have been very upset to see what was done to his characters in the BIG Government solutions to the depression that the show presumes solved everything, I was struck with the thought that tens of thousands of little girls have potentially performed this show over the past 35 years, and with the new revival on Broadway last year, Annie fever will only get revved up to a much higher level as we go forward.
This culture war crap is really demoralizing.
But the truly crazy thing to me is that I LOVED performing the show.
Those songs are embedded on my heart. I have sung them since I was a pre teen, and as we closed the show with a cast performance of Tomorrow last night, I found myself breaking down emotionally with how uplifting it all was…”The sun will come out tomorrow”… yadda yadda yadda.
Hopefully my next show will be Ayn Rands Night of January 16th to even me out politically with my theatrical efforts.
I am grateful for the friendships formed during the production of this show and the extra time I was able to spend with Jeffrey, who will be leaving on his mission next month. Musical Theatre is a magical place to hang out, and the professionalism of the cast, crew, and orchestra was truly amazing. It was a level of Community Theatre that I did not know existed.
A quote from blog post number 2.
He also picked up the part of Bundles in our community production of Annie that I auditioned for last August and he and I have spent many happy hours rehearsing with a dynamic and talented group of actors in our community.
Last saturday night we choreographed the final song in the show, A New Deal for Christmas, which is a political ode to FDR’s Big Government programs.
I was amazed that right in the text of the script it suggests that FDR stand at the head of a fake sleigh and the orphans stand in front as if they are Reindeer and while the president shouts out the names of the men in his cabinet, he is supposed to crack an imaginary whip, mimicking Santa Claus calling out to his Reindeer.
It dawned on me right then that Rush had nailed it with his analysis.
I guess the question must be asked, why would I as a politically aware mother with a certain warped need to share my musical theatre talents audition for a show that is so unapoligetically left of center in its celebration of an economically failed political policy?
I suppose the short answer is that if I were to only audition for purely free market type shows, I would not perform much because so much of Broadway is tinged with leftism, that actors are hard pressed to find politically pure pro capitalist fare.
I also saw the traveling show in Detroit when I was a young girl and spent my childhood singing and performing the show in a variety of venues. Then when I was seventeen I choreographed a medley of songs from Annie and taught it to fifty young mormon girls to perform in our stakes Dance Festival in 1985.
I love certain songs and was thrilled to be cast as understudy for Ms. Hannigan. As I have practiced my parts and re learned the songs, a strong sense of the familiar and upbeat message of the show that Government can step in and fix Depressions, Homelessness, Hunger, and provide Billionaire Daddies to cute little orphaned girls is definitely an easy sell to theatre goers hungry for anything that provides escape from current reality.
The show is cute, has some morality in the sense that the theives and liars get caught, and who can resist a whole passel of young hoofers singing and dancing about A New Deal that will usher in the age of Unicorns and Rainbows?
As for me? I look at participation in this show as an opportunty to hone my craft while attempting not to choke on the words of the songs that have portrayed a Marxist Fraud like FDR as Santa Clause for the past forty years.
I read somewhere that the producers of this show were so thrilled with Jimmy Carters election in the early seventies that they felt the need to write a celebratory musical for the sense of optimism and hope that Carters Presidency manifested in their hearts.
They obviously did not write the show during the final years of his pathetic reign over America.
I have been trying to think what sort of Musical would be appropriate to celebrate the death of Keynes Economic Failures during the final months of 2012.
Iowahawk, my favorite political blogger and a must read on Twitter “Coined” (sorry for the pun) the perfect title for the Musical to be written fifty years hence in a Twitter feed he started a few days ago.
The Twitter Hash Tag #SaveUsMagicCoin contains some hilarious commentary and spoofs the Progressives Delusions about how to fix the Economy.
I would like to officially volunteer to write the Musical that will be the Anti-Annie in the years to come.
We could also title it “Hayeks Revenge”, or “Atlas is Still Shrugging”, or even “Sorry Virginia Santa Claus is really and truly DEAD!”
Healthy Families Podcast Episode #65 🌎 Saturday Night Music featuring the Broadway Musical Annie 🌍