Annie - Still Packin’ ‘Em In After Four Decades

If you can remember the early days of Annie the musical and are still telling your kids or grandchildren that the next birthday is your 21st, yet again, then you are in grave danger of causing them irreparable damage!

Forty two years on from when it first aired on Broadway and then, a year later, on London’s West End, it’s back at Bradford’s Alhambra with all the wonderful predictability of a missing bus in a downpour, and packing them in tighter than a can of sardines.

This is a feelgood musical that somehow appeals to all age groups – 42nd Street with lashings of Guys And Dolls thrown in – and, in the same way that parents take kids to Disneyland, Annie is a musical that speaks to generations with families returning again and again to say hello to Annie, the New York orphan immortalised in Harold Gray’s comic strip.

And there were two stars that shined a tad brighter than the rest, Anita Dobson as gin soaked orphan warden, Miss Hannigan; absolutely wonderful. She took the bares bones of a script and squeezed every last drop of comedy out of the words. But, more than that, she decorated the character with a wonderful range of grimaces, light and shade sounds and body movements, to deliver the complete performance.

And, round every corner, she was stalked by Taziva-Faye Katsande, one of three youngsters anchoring the title role. She, too, was absolutely bang on….with the notes, the moves and the script, breezing through the show seamlessly as she finds a new father in the shape of Alex Bourne as billionaire Daddy Warbucks, another convincing performance.

You know what’s coming with Annie – Hard Knock Life, sometimes flogged to death on tv and the radio, Tomorrow, Easy Street…..and they keep on.

But, for every adult who watches the show and grimaces slightly as a choir of piercing orphans belt out the numbers, usually on key but with limited finesse, there’s hundreds of mesmerised kids in the audience hanging on their every word, because each of them knows they want to be on stage playing one of the orphans who, by the way, were also brilliant, especially cheeky faced Orla McDonagh as the ‘ah factor’ Molly!

And that is the musical’s charm, the ability to suck everyone in from the ice cream lady to the kids, the attendants to the mums and dads……the youngest to the oldest.

Dr Doolittle had a limited run and was earmarked for great things but it didn’t happen. However, more than four decades on Annie – with no gadgets or electronic backdrops, just superb choreography, performance, presentation and music - is still the show of the moment and if you take any youngster along this week, they will give you a stay of execution on any planned tantrums by way of thanks.

Annie
Alhambra Theatre, Bradford
Until Saturday 27th April 2019