Opening Argument: A New Annie Keeps The Dream Of Live Musicals Alive
NBC aired Annie Live! on Thursday night, and you know ... they may be getting the hang of these live musicals.
Ever since NBC aired The Sound of Music Live! in 2013 to huge ratings, there's been a string of uneven efforts to duplicate its commercial success. NBC continued with efforts including The Wiz, Jesus Christ Superstar, Peter Pan, and Hairspray while Fox got in on the action with Grease and Rent, among others. The quality of these has been all over the map. But Annie Live! took a lot of lessons from previous shows and was really solid as a result.
The casting helped. We've learned over time that you can't just cast famous people; you have to cast famous people with the right skills. Harry Connick, Jr. may not be a theater actor, but he's a terrific singer, and some of the songs written for Daddy Warbucks (including "NYC" and "Something Was Missing") are right in his wheelhouse. They even wedged in a chance for him to play the piano! Nicole Scherzinger was a little Pussycat Dolls as Grace without being too Pussycat Dolls. And while Taraji P. Henson was doing a lot as Miss Hannigan -- a lot -- that's what that role is! And in fact, over the course of the production, it felt to me like she toned it down about ten percent and landed on the right level of silliness so it didn't obscure her voice and performance. Titus Burgess and Megan Hilty as Rooster and Lily were wonderful and, for lack of a better word, very Broadway in this great way that grounded the whole thing.
And young Celina Smith as Annie? Terrific. Funny, sharp, a great voice that still sounds ... like a kid, if that makes sense? She didn't sound factory-made; it was just right. And if you don't get that central piece of casting right, everything else collapses.
Even the little girls who are Annie's friends were utterly delightful, especially Molly, played by Felice Kakaletris. Kakaletris is, I think she and her family would not mind my saying, as big a tiny ham as you're ever going to see on stage, and she was very clearly having the time of her life. That's what you want from this show, which is, after all, a kids' show in a lot of ways.
They also skillfully navigated the fact that there are two Annie camps, really: the Broadway cast album people (I'm in that camp, incidentally) and the 1982 movie people. (There are also plenty of people who love the 1999 Disney one with Kathy Bates and the 2014 one with Quvenzhané Wallis, but the hardcore Annie-heads in my experience mostly identify with either the cast album or the Carol Burnett version of Miss Hannigan.) And the trick is that there are songs that are in the original show and not the movie (like "NYC") and songs that are in the movie but weren't in the original show (like "We Got Annie"). The three-hour Annie Live! solved that by including most of both. They restored a lot of songs that have been cut from the film versions, and they stuck with the original Broadway ending because it's hard to do a helicopter rescue on stage. But they put in most of the numbers you expect to see, no matter where you first encountered the material. And while that's kind of maximalist, a production of Annie isn't necessarily meant to be restrained.
Most of all, though, they've figured out that you need a live audience. Some of these productions have been mounted to look more like a live movie, and that never works. This, on the other hand, was created to look like a staging that was captured on film -- kind of like the Hamilton that's on Disney+ -- rather than a movie that happened to be live, and that's the correct call. You can't really hit the end of a number like "It's the Hard-Knock Life" without anybody there to cheer; it's weird. The other ones with audiences, like Jesus Christ Superstar and Grease, have been better for it.
A rather large caveat: There's nothing to be done about the fact that the actual plot of Annie is deeply weird at best: a super-rich guy just borrows a little girl? And decides to adopt her after like a week? And the happy ending hinges on finding out that her birth parents she's been waiting to be reunited with all her life are ... dead? There is only enough story to hang these songs on, honestly, and knowing what I know about the challenges of adoption (let alone transracial adoption!), that story is even harder to swallow as a feel-good fairy tale. This production, like any production of this particular show that isn't substantially changed, runs on pure charisma and charm more than any kind of logic.
But if you can think of it as a hugely dated story with a bunch of good songs, and if you can get past Connick's very bad bald cap (Jamie Foxx had hair in the 2014 Annie! He could have just had hair!), it was actually a really nice example of how to do this format successfully. You can stream it on Peacock if you missed it, and remember to look out for that tiny ham. She's a delight.
(And if you happen to be reading this around lunchtime on Friday, we're hopping into a Twitter Spaces conversation at 2PM Eastern to chat about it. So tune in!)
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We Recommend:
Are you heavily into The Great British Baking Show? I am here to remind you that the new holiday episodes have started dropping on Netflix. Are they great? I don't think so. Are they soothing? Sure.
Also from Netflix, also featuring sweets: They've got a show called School of Chocolate that's kind of what a competitive baking show would be if it didn't even have people getting eliminated, if I can put it that way? It's somehow both more and less stressful than anything else I've ever watched where people get graded on their sweets.
"Say, Linda, do you have a TikTok account involving animals to recommend?" Of course I do. I'm currently very into this one, which adds voiceovers to animal videos. Look, I'm really tired. One needs what one needs!
If you're looking to prep for a couple of things we're covering next week, think about Wheel of Time on Amazon or, yes, The Beatles: Get Back on Disney+.
What We Did This Week:
Charlotte Rutherford/Courtesy of the artist
We were heartbroken by the death of Stephen Sondheim, one of the most important human beings in Broadway history. Glen, Aisha and I remembered him in an episode.
Jeffrey Masters talked to Aisha and me about the musical Tick Tick ... Boom! (Big week for musicals.)
And Glen headed up a panel including Neda Ulaby, Bedatri D. Choudhury and Walter Chaw to talk about Jane Campion's The Power of the Dog and ruminate on what's making them happy this week.
In very exciting news, Stephen interviewed an artist you may have heard of by the name of Lil Nas X.
I recapped last weekend's Succession (the antepenultimate episode of the season, to use a word I love and rarely get to use). I will not spoil the one coming up this weekend except to say that it is a doozy and we gotta talk after.
What's Making Us Happy!
Every week on the show, we talk about some other things out in the world that have been giving us joy lately. Here they are:
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