Annie Dress and Origins Obscured

So, I realize this is maybe the most trivial of trivial subjects, but starting with the Rob Marshall version of Annie (and maybe it had already started occurring in stage productions before that), I note there's zero attempt to connect Annie and Oliver Warbucks in the show with the characters as they had appeared in Little Orphan Annie. Her newhairstyle in the final scene now is really in kind of a Shirley Temple fashion, not the finger-in-the-light-socket Annie fro, she's wearing a red dress, but not designed in the famous, rudimentary style of the comic strip character. Warbucks doesn't wear the tux with diamond stick pin, either, as I recall. On You Tube recently, I saw McArdle telling the newest Annie "Your wig and dress are so much better than mine was!" But she girl isn't made up to look anything like Little Orphan Annie, the way McArdle was.

This means there's a big change in the stylistic structure of the show. Originally it was for the show to start in an almost Dickensian manner and turn into a comic strip by the end of the performance (with little comic book touches throughout--like the car Annie and Grace take from the orphanage--and the tiny version of the car seen way upstage during the scene change). Suddenly at the end, we have the famous comic book characters for the first time, looking like their comic book selves.

This might sound like some kind of old guy (and I'm not young) complaining that things aren't as they were back in my day, but I wasn't a Little Orphan Annie fan as a kid who learned about the musical, I was a musical theater fan as a kid who only discovered Little Orphan Annie through the musical.

Still, I feel like something is lost now. The show sort of doesn't seem have a reason for being. And when Annie finally says "Leaping Lizards" in the final scene, it's odd and sticks out because the phrase doesn't fit into the new context (she hasn't become Little Orphan Annie).

Yet obviously productions still capture the hearts of successive generations. The show still works. Wondered if anyone noticed or cared about this other than me.

Updated On: 7/20/19 at 10:00 PM

Not sure what's crude about it, but I'm relieved someone actually bothered to read my topic. :)

Thank you so much for the compliment. In my directing class in college, the teacher pointed out that scene change of Mitchell's as a great method of transitioning from scene to scene.

To say I'm a little envious of your luck wouldn't cover the half of it. :)

What I'd give to see those models!

The show still works, for sure. I've music directed enough productions to last a lifetime at this point. I do think the shift to more cartoonish elements towards the end of the show--the disguises, Christmas decorations, FDR showing up to save the day--aren't always leaned into as heavily as they could be to bring out the humor in Rooster, Lily, and Hannigan. They're villains, but they're meant to be funny villains.

The challenge now is to keep the show from becoming too earnest at the end. That final scene is quite sad before it gets to the happily ever after and it's hard to find the right balance. Shifting to the known comic strip designs softened the blow in a wonderful, visual way.

The Martha Swope archive has an absolute metric ton of Annie photos:

https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/collections/martha-swope-photographs#/?tab=navigation&roots=5:46278380-c5ea-012f-65f0-58d385a7bc34/467d4590-c5ea-012f-6ea9-58d385a7bc34/29:0eeb7b00-c5ec-012f-377e-58d385a7bc34

One of the albums is just documentation of the set:

https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/c3903dcb-c39f-6201-e040-e00a180642e6

Thanks for posting that website to David's designs above. Admittedly the wonder of his design lay not only in the finished stage pictures but in the magical way they formed and reformed in motion over the course of the night. The design included 2 treadmills running downstage in opposite directions which allowed parades of furniture and/or cast members to float onstage much like a camera pan as the scenic panels slid left to right in sync upstage. Those photos omit all the wonderful interstertial beats in the evening-- the full-size Dusenberg sailing by downstage segueing to a miniature of the car sailing past a row of 5th Ave Brownstones upstage, that sort of thing. I'll also mention the massive use of black and white photo collages overglazed with subtle color was sensationally new back in 1977, if perhaps more of a cliche today.

David was a maser of subtle proportion and repetition to make a set look inevitable and perfectly correct. That opening Orphanage set with its repeated beds, iron posts and windows was pure David-- elegant, evocative and pure. His design never said "Look at me! What an amazing designer I am!" It said, "Here's exactly what you need to tell this story and no more." How many designers on Broadway today follow that dictum?