On this day in New York · April 21, 1977
Annie Opens at the Alvin Theatre
A thirteen-year-old belted out a song about tomorrow, and a shoestring musical about a comic-strip orphan became the toughest ticket on Broadway.
The facts
- Opened
- April 21, 1977, at the Alvin Theatre (now the Neil Simon Theatre), West 52nd Street
- Based on
- Harold Gray's 1924 comic strip Little Orphan Annie
- Creative team
- Music by Charles Strouse, lyrics by Martin Charnin (who also directed), book by Thomas Meehan
- Run
- 2,377 performances, closing January 2, 1983
- Tony Awards
- 7 wins from 11 nominations, including Best Musical, Best Score, and Best Book
Annie opened on April 21, 1977, at the Alvin Theatre on West 52nd Street, built from Harold Gray's 1924 comic strip Little Orphan Annie. Charles Strouse wrote the music, Martin Charnin the lyrics (and directed), and Thomas Meehan the book. Andrea McArdle, thirteen years old, played Annie opposite Reid Shelton as Daddy Warbucks and Dorothy Loudon as the gin-soaked Miss Hannigan. The New York Times critic Clive Barnes reviewed it the next morning and all but guaranteed its future, and the show ran for nearly six years, becoming for a long stretch the longest-running production the Alvin ever hosted.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
-
To dislike the new musical Annie would be tantamount to disliking motherhood, peanut butter, friendly mongrel dogs and nostalgia
Clive Barnes, in his New York Times review of the Broadway opening, April 1977
Source: Broadway.com -
Dorothy Loudon never puts a sneer, a leer, or even a scream in the wrong place, and her singing has just the right brassy bounce to it.
Clive Barnes, on Dorothy Loudon's Miss Hannigan, New York Times review, April 1977
Source: Broadway.com
Why it still matters
Annie opened during the city's ugliest financial stretch, and it sold New Yorkers a Depression-era orphan singing that the sun would come out tomorrow, which is exactly the kind of stubborn optimism this town likes to tell itself it invented. Nearly fifty years on, that song is still the first one every kid at an audition knows cold.
Sources
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