REVIEW : Annie at 30 still enchants all ages
Posted on Friday, January 11, 2008
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/News/213344/
FAYETTEVILLE — Annie is irresistible — the girl and the show.
The 30 th anniversary touring production of the musical opened Tuesday night at the Walton Arts Center. Performances continue through Sunday. An Annie tour last came to the arts center in 1996.
In the well-known story, based on Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie comic strip, Annie trades in laboring at an orphanage for pampering by a billionaire.
The costumes and sets were wonderful in this show, set in December 1933 in New York. And the audience enjoyed the familiar songs.
Amanda Balon, as Annie, captured the audience from the start with her sweet, strong voice on the first song, “Maybe.” In the song, 11-year-old Annie thinks about her real parents, who left her at the orphanage when she was a baby.
Annie and six fellow orphan girls delivered fun choreography as they sang “It’s the Hard-Knock Life,” using scrub brushes and metal buckets in their moves.
Annie spent much of the show with a cute bowl haircut. Her locks only went curly at the end, when she got “gussied up” for a celebration.
Several adults handily and capably played several sets of supporting roles — from radio show personalities to Daddy Warbucks’ staff to bums in a Hooverville camp for the destitute during the Depression.
In this show, Mikey, the dog who played Annie’s beloved Sandy, behaved very well and was an adorable mutt for the part. Annie first sang the unforgettable “Tomorrow” when finding her dog as a stray. Balon later sang the song with infectious enthusiasm while standing on an Oval Office table in President Franklin Roosevelt’s White House. Then, Roosevelt directed his staff to sing the cheery tune, and they developed the New Deal.
Lynn Andrews, making her national tour debut, was delightful as Miss Hannigan. As the whistle-blowing, liquor-gulping orphanage matron, she makes being mean very funny. She had a wonderfully wicked laugh and solid singing voice, and she created great visual moments with her plump body. Miss Hannigan, her con-artist brother and his girlfriend also sang and danced to an engaging, saucy tune, “Easy Street.”
As the trio plot to get the $ 50, 000 reward being offered to Annie’s parents, the staff at the Warbucks home are falling in love with the charming redhead.
David Barton played Oliver Warbucks, the all-business billionaire whose heart softens as he gets to know Annie, after taking her in for two weeks at Christmas. Barton was fabulous, strong yet tender in his manner and yielding dynamic vocals on songs.
In this show, Annie makes Warbucks care about something other than success, and he opens her eyes to another kind of parent — one who’s not biological. Though he wants to adopt the girl, he agrees to search for the birth parents she’s still desperately missing. And he helps her deal with the answers they find.
This fun and uplifting show makes for a long time for young children to sit still — about two hours and 20 minutes, plus an intermission. But if parents are willing to bring them, they’ll enjoy it as much as their children.