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New Castle’s ‘Annie’ is a familiar face
NEW CASTLE, Pa.
I’m not sure whether the sun will come out tomorrow, but you can bet your bottom dollar that “Annie” is almost certain to be playing at a community theater near you. Last weekend alone two separate versions of “Annie” opened locally: the Boardman Drama Guild’s production at the Boardman Performing Arts Center, and a spiffy New Castle Playhouse revival directed by the estimable Michael Cavalier.
Based upon the iconic Harold Gray comic strip, Charles Strouse, Martin Charnin and Thomas Meehan’s musical premiered in 1977, and has been pretty much inescapable ever since, thanks to touring companies, Broadway revivals, movie (1982) and TV (1999) adaptations, and countless grade/high school and community theater productions.
Cavalier’s NCP “Annie” is a perfectly adequate, if rarely inspired, rendering of a show that, by all rights, should probably be given a (very) long rest. There’s only so many times even the most benevolent of souls can handle plucky, red-headed orphans; chrome-domed billionaires; the drag queen-y shenanigans of boo-hissable Miss Hannigan; and FDR’s bloviating stump speeches. Talk about your hard-knock lives!
And yet, there are undeniable pleasures to be gleaned from this particular iteration of “Annie.” The sets and costumes are typically NCP top-drawer, music director Maura Fornatoro and her 13-member orchestra do wonders with Strouse’s pedestrian score and much of the casting is spot-on.
Alan McCreary must have felt positively liberated by having his head shaved to play Daddy Warbucks, since this is his liveliest, most enjoyable performance in years.
Inveterate scene-stealer Benjamin Solomon makes con man Rooster an impish delight; Neal Edman aces a variety of character roles (including Bert Healy and FDR Cabinet member Ickes); Kali Davies-Anderson gives a sly reading of the frequently overbaked Miss Hannigan (“Why any kid would want to be an orphan, I’ll never know”); Erica Vandevort makes Lily St. Regis a vampish hoot; and Phillip L. Clark, Jr. brings both gravitas and a much-needed dose of self-deprecating humor to wheelchair-bound FDR.
Sure, I would have preferred that the orphan girls hadn’t been quite so, er, boisterous in the opening scene (their screeching and squealing had a fingernails-on-a-blackboard effect due to faulty miking). And Annie herself (Holy Family fourth-grader Chloe Noel Housteau) comes across as a tad over-rehearsed, perhaps because she’s already played Annie previously.
As a result, there’s precious little spontaneity in Housteau’s reprise of her Marquee-winning Carnation City Players performance.
That’s pretty much the central problem with the NCP “Annie” as a whole. There’s a certain robotic, been there/sang that quality to the proceedings — it’s as though everyone was simply going through the motions to fill the theater’s designated “holiday” slot.
While there’s nothing wrong with giving your audience the theatrical equivalent of comfort food, it would be nice if Cavalier & Co. ventured out of their comfort zone every now and then and tried something ... different. Cavalier’s acclaimed 2006 NCP production of Stephen Sondheim’s “Assassins” already seems like a million years ago.