When six-year-old Molly wakes up from a bad dream, Annie comforts her by singing about her own parents even though they abandoned her at the orphanage as a baby, she holds on to the hope that they will come back for her ("Maybe"). In 1933 in New York City, eleven-year-old Annie sleeps in an orphanage with many other girls her age. Meehan's book was accepted by Charnin and Strouse, but considerable material had to be trimmed out – material which Meehan would later restore for his novelization. Meehan saw the character of Annie as a 20th-century American female version of the titular orphan characters created by Charles Dickens in works such as Oliver Twist and David Copperfield, with the mystery of Annie's abandonment and unknown parenthood as consistent with a strand of mysteries in Dickens' tales. As Meehan, Charnin and Strouse were all from New York, and given what he saw as the downbeat mood of the then-current Nixon era and Vietnam War, Meehan set his story in New York during the similarly downbeat Great Depression. Meehan researched by rereading prints of the comic strip, but was unable to find any satisfactory material for a musical other than the characters of Annie, Oliver Warbucks, and Sandy, so he decided to write his own story. The musical's songs " Tomorrow" and " It's the Hard Knock Life" are among its most popular musical numbers.Ĭharnin first approached Meehan to write the book of a musical about Little Orphan Annie in 1972. It spawned numerous productions in many countries, as well as national tours, and won seven Tony Awards, including for Best Musical.
The original Broadway production opened in 1977 and ran for nearly six years, setting a record for the Alvin Theatre (now the Neil Simon Theatre). It is based on the 1924 comic strip Little Orphan Annie by Harold Gray. Annie is a musical with music by Charles Strouse, lyrics by Martin Charnin, and a book by Thomas Meehan.
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