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Culture Musicals

Annie

ANNIE (TYA) by Thomas Meehan, Charles Strouse and Martin Charnin (Young Peoples Theatre, 165 Front East). Runs to December 29, see youngpeoplestheatre.ca for schedule. $22-$35. 416-862-2222. See listing. Rating: NNN

Annie, one of the most popular musicals of the past 30 years, is a surefire hit with young viewers, given that a number of its characters are children and another is a winning canine.

No surprise, then, that the show has been adapted into a production aimed at ages five and up. That’s the theatre for young audiences 80-minute version that Young People’s Theatre presents as its holiday musical.

The cut-down show provides the basics. It’s the Great Depression, 1933, and red-headed Annie (Jenny Weisz), left by her parents at Miss Hannigan’s orphanage with a promise that they’ll return to pick her up, escapes the nasty Miss H (Louise Pitre). She’s soon returned by the police, only to be taken in by tycoon Oliver Warbucks (Sterling Jarvis) for Christmas. He likes her so much that he plans to adopt her, but Hannigan’s finagling brother, Rooster (W. Joseph Matheson), concocts a plot to get Annie himself, along with some of Warbucks’s money.

Too bad this version cuts almost all sense of the characters, whose motivations become paper-thin. Director Allen MacInnis does a fine job staging and, with the help of music director Diane Leah and choreographer Nicola Pantin (I loved the echoes of 30s musicals in the Warbucks staff’s dancing), gives life to the show, but the script leaves out too many narrative steps in getting us to a happy ending.

The company does generally good work despite the script’s lack of characterization. The man-hungry Miss Hannigan isn’t quite the right fit for high-energy performer Pitre, but she has fun being wicked, and her Easy Street number with Matheson and Natasha O’Brien as Rooster’s moll, Lily, is a production highlight. Her turn as one of Roosevelt’s grey-wigged cabinet ministers – Richard Binsley is an exuberant charmer as FDR, inspired by Annie to think up the New Deal and the WPA – is also strong.

Jarvis’s Warbucks grows as the show progresses by the second half, he provides humanity to the billionaire in the warmly delivered Something Was Missing and, with Annie and his staff, I Don’t Need Anything But You.

The show sinks or flies on its Annie, and Weisz is perfectly cast: childlike but not childish, innocent and optimistic but neither saccharine nor Pollyanna-ish. Musically she’s a dream, nailing the show’s best-known song, Tomorrow, both emotionally and vocally.

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