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Awake and sing
Everything’s coming up musicals
BY CAROLYN CLAY

Annie
Book by Thomas Meehan. Music by Charles Strouse. Lyrics by Martin Charnin. Directed by Amanda Dehnert. Musical direction by Amanda Dehnert. Choreography by Sharon Jenkins. Set by David Jenkins. Costumes by William Lane. Lighting by Bryon Winn. Sound by Peter Sasha Hurowitz. Animals trained by William Berloni. With Andrea C. Ross, Fred Sullivan Jr., Janice Duclos, Mauro Hantman, Melissa D’Amico, Brian McEleney, Erick Pinnick, Angela Williams, and Lola. At Trinity Repertory Company through June 8.
The Music Man
Book, music, and lyrics by Meredith Willson. Story by Meredith Willson and Franklin Lacey. Directed by Ray Roderick. Choreography by Susan Stroman, re-created by Liam Burke. Musical direction by Bill Tinsley. Set by J. Branson. Costumes by Tom Reiter. Lighting by Charlie Morrison. Sound by Lucas J. Corrubia Jr. With Gerritt Vandermeer, Carolann M. Sanita, Catherine Denison Blades, Albert E. Parker, Morgan Williams, Pam Feicht, Joshua Siegel, Corey Elias, Joseph Torello, Bert Rodriguez, Pay


There’s more than one way to skin a warhorse, and you can count on Amanda Dehnert to come up with a good one. In the case of Annie, the Depression-era comic strip that became a Tony-winning 1977 musical, she both toughens up the story and frames the show in the escapist-entertainment venue that cheered a sagging America in the 1930s. The paradox is that she gives Annie a touch of true grit and a dose of Busby Berkeley. The production opens on David Jenkins’s big deco-and-dirt-streaked set dominated by a picture-book billboard touting " the world’s highest standard of living. " What look like young hoofers of the period appear at various corners of the stage, apparently trying to tap their way out of the Depression. A single horn blows a wisp of " Tomorrow " and is joined by a saxophone. At center stage is a little shrine to the Broadway Annie — the red dress, a program, some sheet music — that’s whisked away as the surprisingly smoky overture ends. The smell of reinvention is in the air, and it’s exhilarating. But Dehnert is a gifted director, not an alchemist, and she can’t turn this relentlessly perky paean to mañana into a down-and-outers’ documentary crossed with Gold Diggers of 1933.

Damn good try, though. Dehnert, whose inventive production of My Fair Lady was scored for two pianos, does something similar with Annie. Off to one side of the playing space is what looks like a rehearsal pianist (Tim Robertson) at an old upright; he’s joined, variously, by banjo, sax, violin, a couple of horns, harp, and, briefly, a brass band culled from the acting ensemble. Moreover, the production is mercifully low on Andrea McCardle–ish belting. The Annie of Andrea C. Ross sings, for the most part, naturally and affectingly, and Angela Williams brings a gorgeous, trained soprano to Daddy Warbucks’ knowing and attractive secretary, Grace Farrell.

In fact, Annie marks a step up for Trinity musicals in that new blood, in the form of several accomplished singer-dancers, has been brought in to augment the part of the regular troupe (minus Rachael Warren) that can sing. The stalwarts include main musical showboat Fred Sullivan Jr., whose Daddy Warbucks combines a feral, almost mafioso brashness with a touching tenderness for Annie. And as mean Miss Hannigan, the orphanage matron who hates " Little Girls, " Janice Duclos is no boozy caricature but a put-upon borderline-hysterical as threadbare as her charges, with disarranged crimped white hair and a big belt in her pocket that she uses. Also in the cast are a bevy of local girls who don’t cutesify the orphans but bring to them, as Ross does to Annie, eagerness, cynicism, and forlornness. Watching the Christmas bustle of " N.Y.C. " through the grimy orphanage window, they’re like clamoring pet-shop pups, but the choreography for " Hard Knock Life " has an angular aggressiveness that’s more like a Celtic tantrum.

Dehnert has invented fantasy parents for Annie who whoosh through the show like a dream, their abandoned daughter often huddled quietly on a stage step instead of putting the show across like some pint-sized Ethel Merman. On the other hand, this Annie isn’t all sackcloth and Hoovervilles. It boasts not only a title placard lit up in lights but some bravura production numbers and a hilariously self-congratulatory turn by Brian McEleney as FDR, who takes off from the determined optimism of " Tomorrow " to cook up the New Deal. Dehnert, homing in on the bittersweetness at the core of the cartoon, demonstrates her ability to turn a Broadway purse into something closer to a sow’s ear. But at the end of the play it’s still Annie. Next season she takes on a worthier contender: West Side Story.

MEANWHILE, THE MUSIC MAN, in a lavish, populous production based on the 2000 Broadway revival, 76-trombones its way into Boston. And if there’s trouble in River City, it has less to do with the quality of the staging than with the controversy surrounding its being the first Broadway hit to play Boston, among other major markets, for the first time in a non-Equity production. (Non-union tours of Cats and Annie have passed through town but only in the shows’ umpteenth incarnations.) The staging is produced by Big League Theatricals, which started out touring places more like River City. It’s directed by Ray Roderick, who was associate director of the Tony-nominated revival directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman (she managed to lose both Tonys that year to herself, for Contact). Liam Burke, who was in the Broadway production, replicates Stroman’s spirited choreography.

Meredith Willson’s 1957 show about a charismatic con man who bilks the no-nonsense population of River City, Iowa, into buying band instruments and uniforms, on the promise that he will teach their kids to play and march, is about as cornball as they come. And the Big Leagues staging is as broad as a barn, though enlivened by Stroman’s choreography once-removed. The public-library-set phantasmagoria built on " Marian the Librarian " is reminiscent of the Italian-restaurant episode of Contact, with Gerritt Vandermeer’s slinky Harold Hill actually climbing the card catalogue and Carolann M. Sanita’s Marian knocked quite off her pinions. And the opening number, sung by traveling salesmen and sharply timed to coordinate with their moving train, is almost as rhythmic as Stomp. Moreover, if Big Leagues is saving money on the actors (of whom there are 36) and musicians, it’s plowing some of that into the Norman Rockwell sets and lush costumes, a number of which are appealingly ice-cream-colored and which include band uniforms all around for the showy curtain call.

Although there are some caterwaulers and hambones among the older performers, the dancers, including an impressive acrobat, are ebullient and tireless and the leads are strong. Vandermeer, though he hardly seems a seasoned bamboozler, sings well and is dashingly clean-cut. Sanita is a brisk and determined, if eventually thawed, Marian. Her singing is operatic rather than glitteringly straight in the manner of Barbara Cook, but it’s very accomplished, putting particular luster on " Till There Was You. "

BY CONTRAST WITH ANNIE and even the terpsichoreanly tweaked Music Man, Stoneham Theatre’s production of the 1965 inspirational warbler Man of La Mancha is utterly conventional, thoroughly professional, and handsomely bankrolled for a suburban theater company in just its second season of operation. Unlike the downtown Music Man, Stoneham’s La Mancha fields 17 actors, 11 of whom are Equity members. " But why do it? " , this viewer wondered before walking into an almost full house on an inclement afternoon and getting the picture. (Man of La Mancha is currently enjoying a Broadway revival as well.) Director/choreographer Susan Streater’s well-sung if somewhat wooden production gives the audience what they’re for, from the picturesque dungeon complete with ominously looming and creaking overhead stair to the rickety hero’s rise from the deathbed for a last bellow of " The Impossible Dream. " Most of the musical numbers end in flourishy little tableaux.

The Dale Wasserman/Mitch Leigh/Joe Darion musicalization of Don Quixote presents Miguel de Cervantes’s early-17th-century tale of the disillusioned country squire who imagines himself an idealistic " knight errant " as an entertainment fashioned by " poet of the theater " Cervantes to entertain the cutthroats he’s thrown in with while awaiting an interview with the Spanish Inquisition. He makes himself up, gives everyone a part, and presents his masterpiece as a sort of defense of his life. This allows for some philosophic banter about fact versus truth and illusion versus despair as well as for a Story Theater encapsulation of the tale itself, complete with an off-stage windmill tilt and Quixote’s on-stage elevation of roadside-inn kitchen slut Aldonza to " Lady " status, with brutal results.

Streater’s staging closely follows the ANTA Washington Square original. Bryan Scott Johnson, once he pastes on his narrow beard and dons his rusty helmet, resembles long- and woeful-countenanced original Quixote Richard Kiley, and I admired the way he does not grandstand his way through the anthemic " The Impossible Dream " but underplays it. Anthony Santelmo Jr., who has made something of a cottage industry of the role (touring through 38 states), is a humane and amusing Sancho. Mary Jayne Raleigh brings every tough-gal cliché imaginable to her wiry Aldonza; yet it’s hard to imagine another way to play this combination of bodice and attitude, and she sings with technique and feeling. Stoneham’s La Mancha is well sung in general. But is a less sanitized staging too impossible to dream?

Issue Date: May 9 - 15, 2003
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