Annie Captured Our Hearts In Red
Sunday, April 13, 2014
We got lost. Between my dyslexia and New
West’s streets and avenues with few having a real name. But we had left with
plenty of time and arrived half an hour early. This was our first exposure to
Massey Theatre, with the fee, the red cutain, the red seats, of a grand old movie house of my youth.. And it was to be a wonderfully rewarding one of which I will
always remember in the colour red!
 |
| Lauren, 11 |
The lobby was full of older people with
many children. It was packed. I overheard them comparing notes on previous
experiences with the musical and or the film (which neither Lauren or I ever
saw.) I had a chat with the legendary dancer/actor Jeff Hyslop who was there
with a child. I also saw an extremely serious (one of the funniest men on
earth) Norm Grohmann. We talked of my favourite CBC funny radio program ever,
Doctor Bundolo’s Pandemonium Medicine Show. I felt I was in a time warp. I had
first photographed Hyslop and Grohman in the late 70s. The audience there
seemed to be straight from that Burnaby
neighbourhood I had lived back then - a world that preceded iPhones and
terrorism – a kinder more naïve world.
I was to be proven wrong.
This production has a big, nicely loud and
competent band with lots of brass. Lauren and I liked the band and during the
interval we went to look down on the orchestra pit and she asked me the name of
every visible instrument. I spotted and noted a beautiful bass clarinet.
I was nicely surprised that Valerie Easton
who I first met and photographed in the late 70s as a dancer with Jeff Hyslop
and Jim Hibbard at the CBC, then as a choreographer for Arts Club Theatre musicals
is the Artistic Director. At halftime I had a short chat and she seemed
serious, something about the night not being as good as the previous one. She
must be a perfectionist because this show which has lots (and lots) of set
movement went without a hitch.
Lauren became enamored with the little girls
at the orphanage particularly with the real-life sister of the stage Annie,
Julia MacLean. This was Jamie MacLean, 8, as Molly. She is so tiny that Lauren
said, “She looks like she is in kindergarten.” I am confident that Jamie could
fill GM Place
(or whatever it is called now) with her voice.
Since I had seen Steve Maddock (Oliver
Warbucks) in the Arts Club Theatre production of Disney’s The Beauty and the
Beast I knew that Maddock looks a lot like Lauren’s father. She admitted she
was right.
In our ignorance of all things Annie we
were disappointed to note that this production’s Annie did not have curly red
hair. It was straight. But again we were proven wrong and I will not reveal anything
more on this!
Caitlin Clugston as Miss Hannigan who rules
the orphanage between swigs from her hip flask (not stored there but in a much
more intimate place), pretty well ruled the stage as well every time she was
on. At first I thought her performance was over-the-top until I figured, “I am
watching a live presentation of a cartoon strip. And of course it has to be
over the top.”
Lauren had a great time. I watched her
during the show and her smile was almost constant. But she could have never
understood how this play, which one would think is totally dated, is not. In
fact the dialogue between Maddock’s Warbucks and R.G. Miller’s Franklin D. Roosevelt (nicely performed with lots of warmth)
felt like one (much more civilized, of course as things seemed then) in today’s
United States House of Representatives. You see Warbucks is a Republican and
Roosevelt the “New Deal” Democrat. Warbucks’s recommendation to getting people
out of the streets into his factories seemed like contemporary Rachel talking
points from the Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC.
In short this production (I cannot wait to
see what Valerie Easton will do with My Fair Lady, next year) will please
children of all ages but at the same time it will challenge the ideas we adults
have about the social and economic pressures of our age.
Annie will be on until April 26.
