Arts
Teeth 'n' glassy smiles
Benny Green
Annie (Victoria Palace)
A few minutes before the curtain was due to rise, I went down to the orchestra rail and peered into the pit in search of a few familiar faces. There is no more reliable guide to the true quality of a musical score than the opinion of the instrumentalist who has to play it night after night. The men in the pit are, after all, the only authentic professionals in the entire equation of the musical, so it was interesting that when I leaned over the rail and inquired of two or three associates pottering with reeds and valves, 'Any music tonight?', they gave me those grins which are a silent invocation not to ask stupid questions. I returned to my seat resigned to the usual diet of diatonic staggers and sequential infantilism, with the occasional fashionable unresolved discord.
The Victoria Palace is not quite the ideal arena in which to take the measure of a new musical work; sitting in the first few rows of the stalls, invariably end up with two pains in the neck, one from the singing of singers who are not really singers at all, and the other from the need to incline the head at a backward angle of thirty degrees for hours at a time; any small business undertaken upstage by small people is lost on the customer, who has nothing but the audible reactions of the back stalls to guide him. The most appropriate events in a venue like the Victoria Palace are conspiracies like the Crazy Gang, who tended to drop all their best effects down-stage leering at the congregation, which is why the recollection I will link forever with the place is of Monsewer Eddie Gray as a psychiatrist analysing the contents of Bud Flanagan's head, with the cirrus clouds of , cigarette smoke drifting rapidly up thrOugh the spotlight, and the triumphant howls of recognition from us yulgarians in the audience bouncing against the walls.
I cannot help wondering what Flanagan and company might not have done to the book of Annie had they ever been allowed to lay their hands on it. A story about a lovable orphan who makes remarks like 'I want to have a mother and father again' and who is befriended by an irascible billidnaire with a heart of gold who comforts her when the search for her parents had foundered by saying, 'I love you'; this is the stuff that rabelasian screams are made on, and it says much for the pace and professionalism of the production that mawkishness never quite swamps the wit of the characterisations. As to why it doesn't, this has much to do with the brisk efficiency with which Andrea McArdle as Annie, goes about her business. Her face is a face born for raising the stakes on a pair of deuces; no suffering ever registers on it; no expectancy is ever disappointed in it; no injustice ever dismays it. It is as though Annie, having sized up the adult world, had decided that to expect sympathy and understanding from it would be silly, and that her face must forever more register nothing more revealing than a smile of glassy quietism. In the normal course of events this kind of portrayal would be a nightmare, but in Annie it is utterly appropriate, for a curious reason. Harold Gray, the artist who drew the comic strip, apparently had so little technique that he never mastered the art of drawing the human eye. The upshot was that for decade after decade Annie walked through the boxes of her comicstrip world without an eyeball to her name, looking like a pair of empty sockets surrounded by a brave smile — for which reason Miss McArdle's smiling indifference to catastrophe is perfectly true to the spirit of the original.
Not all the other parts are interpreted half as well. Sheila Hancock's villainous crone Miss Hannigan is a crazy gal limaufrey of grunts and grimaces and double takes; none of it is difficult to do, and it may well comprise a cheap way to get laughs, but such a performance, where the actress creates the illusion of a chin which often has intimate con sultations with the end of her nose, and does things to her body which evoke thoughts of a hyper-active bullfrog, is perfectly in keeping with the comic-strip spirit which presumably is supposed to suffuse the production; it is a brave, swaggering performance whose generosity excuses its occasional coarsenesses. Being of a charitable disposition, I am not pre pared to delve too deeply into the business of how far some of the other principals are qualified for a musical career, but Kenneth Nelson's Rooster Hannigan is an extremely cleverly observed sketch of a confidence trickster assuming the pastel shades of dull respectability.
There is one other, fascinating point to be made about Annie. Considerable con jecture flourishes as to whether the original strip, drawn with a kind of dogged gaucherie by Mr Gray, was meant to be taken at its face value as a celebration of tycoonery and conservative politics, or as a vicious satire of the same by a sardonic radical. Fortunately for those like myself, who neither know or care enough about Annie's genesis to plant a party rosette in its buttonhole, the musical ver sion of 'Little Orphan Annie' has little to do with anything which was ever published under her name. The libretto attempts to reveal something that Gray never bothered with, the first meeting between Annie and the armaments profiteer Warbucks, and whatever the political intentions of the comic strip, the party attachments of the musical are plain
to see; the show is a retrospective votegrabber for FDR. Not only does Mr Roosevelt appear in person, not only is he the deus ex machina who straightens out the denouement, but his rival Herbert Hoover is vilified in a first Act song which is by far the most resourceful piece of songwriting of the evening. The sentiments of 'We'd Like to Say Thanks, Mr Hoover' are merciless; the humour arises out of the sheer viciousness of their content and the delicious passion with which they are delivered, by a bunch of deadbeats who convince you that if only they could find Mr Hoover they would strew him in gobbets around the stage. The moment the throb of the crochet accompaniement to the song begins, the mind Is engaged with thoughts of the old Germanic way of doing things on the musical stage, where every discord pleases, and only Mann is Weill. In admitting, almost to my own surprise, that I found the show engaging, amusing and for most of the time interesting, 1
have to correct a misapprehension as to the nature of the catharsis it effects.
Understandably when people hear that Annie is about dogs and orphans, they assume that the writers have tried to tug at the heartstrings of the world. I can only say that if that it true, and that was their intention, they have very fortunatelY failed. On the night I saw Annie there wasn't a wet eye in the house.
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