Annie and Sandy in the 5th Avenue Theatre’s production of “Annie” onstage through December 30, 2018.
So many musicals about New York City on area stages! One’s a classic from our youth and one is a fresher taker on a different part of town…
The classic is ANNIE, the beloved 1977 musical based on the comic strip “Little Orphan Annie” about a plucky little orphan living in New York City during the Great Depression (the 1930s) who gets adopted by the richest man in the world, Daddy Warbucks and has scads of adventures all over the world battling despicable criminals and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal!
“Annie the Musical” naturally serves as an origin story and opens with the plucky 11 year old Annie living in a drab orphanage run by the dipsomaniac/child hating Miss Hannigan and dreaming of a life with her parents, who she is sure will return soon to claim her…she even still has half of the locket they left with here when she was left on the orphanage doorstep. After Annie has a fight with the drunken Hannigan, she runs away and meets her new best friend, the adorable pooch Sandy. Naturally she is eventually caught and returned to the clutches of the awful Hannigan who is about to administer punishment on Annie for running away when Grace, the secretary to Oliver Warbucks the richest man in the world, arrives to choose Annie to live with the millionaire over the Christmas holidays.
Annie charms everyone she meets including President Roosevelt and his cabinet but most importantly Warbucks who instigates a national search to find Annie’s birth parents. When it appears the search is turning up nothing, Warbucks proposes he adopt Annie, but at the last minute, mysterious strangers show up….are they really Annie’s parents? Or, a con job cooked up by Miss Hannigan and her conman brother?
Thomas Meehan’s book and the songs by Charles Strouse (music) and Martin Charnin (lyrics) were delightfully “classic” Broadway and the show became a huge hit spawning hit songs like “Tomorrow” and “Hard Knock Life” and led to numerous tours, revivals, film and television versions and became the go to dream role for thousands of budding young musical theater actresses (and young gay boys…) who wanted to belt those terrific songs.
And, those songs still hold up after 40 years and the 5th Avenue’s production is still great fun. Local Seattle musical theater actress Billie Wildrick who has branched into directing in recent years, has done a fine job of staging. The actors are mostly quite good, the little girls playing the other orphans are adorably super talented and the real dogs playing Sandy are still crowd pleasingly fantastic.
My only complaint: the sets look a tad rundown….they’re rentals from the last national tour of “Annie” and they frankly look a bit….worn out and cheap with an over reliance on painted backdrops. I get that even big theater companies must be budget conscious but it would have been nice if the 5th Avenue had created their own sets.
Still….Annie is a treat with a score you’ll be whistling all the way home. Or, if you’re not self conscious, belting out “Tomorrow” as you walk down the street.
Lin-Manuel Miranda’s IN THE HEIGHTS at Seattle Rep through December 30, 2018
Over at Seattle Repertory Theatre at Seattle Center, there’s a different kind of New York show…one that’s a tad more modern. It’s a mini-tour of the hit show Lin-Manuel Miranda did BEFORE the juggernaut success of his “Hamilton”….it’s IN THE HEIGHTS, his 2007 Tony Award winning musical about life in the NYC neighborhood of Washington Heights, the very northerly neighborhood (north of Harlem) on the isle of Manhattan that is home to thousands of Latinx people, the majority of them from Spanish speaking Caribbean islands like Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and Cuba.
Fans of Miranda who came to love the actor/song writer/theater maker via the huge success of the innovative Hamilton, which has a score that is almost entirely rap/hip hop might be surprised to learn that In The Heights is a more traditional, classically structured Broadway musical. Miranda and co-book writer Quiara Alegría Hudes (a playwright who herself has won a Pulitzer Prize for her play Water by the Spoonful) created a libretto that is very structured like “old school/Golden Age” Broadway musicals with the story revolving around traditional musical theater couples. In the case of “Heights”, the story centers on two primary couples, the slightly larger of the two centers on the character of Usnavi (the role Miranda played), the kind hearted but frustrated young owner of a neighborhood shop who dreams of escaping the drudgeries of his life with his crush object Vanessa who works in a neighborhood salon. The other principal couple focuses on Usnavi’s childhood friend/practically a sister, Nina Rosario who won a scholarship to Stanford University but comes home to the Heights after a disastrous first year in college and afraid to tell her parents about it.
The parents, Kevin and Camila, have their own woes as they struggle with their failing taxi business where the ambitious young Benny is employed. Benny and Nina have a crush on one another but Benny isn’t Latinx/Spanish speaking and that’s a problem for Kevin.
There’s also “Abuela” Claudia, a neighborhood matriarch who helped raise Usnavi, who is in failing health…as well as Sonny, Usnavi’s brash younger cousin and Daniela and Carla from the Salon. One of the main strengths of In The Heights is the relationships between all theses characters…the sense of family and community is vital to the power of the story which follows these characters through three days around a heat wave over the 4th of July.
In The Heights is a musical of great charm. The songs are fine, though not quite the sophisticated blockbusters Miranda later created for “Hamilton” but unlike that hit, “Heights” features a greater variety of song styles.
The show is charmer and features a talented cast of actors from across the country, many of whom have done this show in other productions. It’s a co-production with the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre and Cincinatti Playhouse in the Park.
Again, like with “Annie”, my chief complaint with this production of “In The Heights” is the rather drab scenic design. It’s functional but not particularly visually interesting. Drab even. Village Theatre premiered In The Heights a few years back and they featured a far more interesting and lively set design.
Still. Meh design excepted, the familial charms of In The Heights make it very much worth seeing.
About the Author: Michael Strangeways
