(above) Cheryl Hoffmann and J. Michael Zygo. Photo: Phil Martin
The so called “Great Depression” visits San Diego in an all singing and dancing production of “Annie” in Broadway San Diego’s ongoing season presentation of musicals at the Civic Theater.
If you haven’t seen “Annie” and get a kick out wonderfully hokey choreography in the old hoofer tradition, Peter Gennero’s work is forever danceable.
With musical numbers restaged by his daughter, Liza Gennaro, the show is a colorful story and full of tunes you will hum on your way out. If for only the virtue of song and dance, this show is worth an evening with ever, some might say overly, optimistic little orphan Annie, borne out of Harold Gray’s news paper comic strip.
Billed as the “30th Anniversary Tour,” the show’s lyricist and original director, Martin Charnin, returns to stage the show anew (Mike Nichols was brought in to “doctor” the original Broadway production) with music by Charles Strouse and a libretto by Thomas Meehan.
Mr. Meehan’s librettos for the stage include “The Producers,” “Hairspray,” “Young Frankenstein,” among others, and has been a collaborator with Mel Brooks on several of his screen plays. Meehan is a contributing writer to the New Yorker magazine.
The orphan girls sing “It's the Hand-Knock Life” in the show’s first production number as they scrub the floor of their orphanage run by the abusive alcoholic Miss Hannigan, always a wildly hilarious turn for a skilled comic actress and one of the most sure-fire comic characters in modern musical theatre. A pre-New Deal Hooverville also scores a scene and musical number, too.
In case the kids in the show or the audience need a reference for the kind of desperation people were in during the Depression all they need do is look Third Avenue and “C” Street as the exit the Civic Theater. There they will see rows of the sleepless homeless on the concrete sidewalks. Art imitates life so easily these days. It is a hard knock life for them.
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