UK Edition
Review
Miranda Hart's West End debut is just what London needs right now – Annie, Piccadilly Theatre, review
This is just what London needs right now. Young girls belting out “Tomorrow, tomorrow, I love ya, tomorrow!” at the tops of their voices, full of life, full of hope, fists clenched, boots stamping in defiance. That, plus the spectacle of Miranda Hart, queen of the feelgood British sitcom, making her West End (and musical) debut in a role outside her plummy-pleasant comfort-zone – horrible NYC orphanage manageress Miss Hannigan. OK, so she’s no Imelda Staunton in waiting, but singing and hoofing (after a fun fashion) she’s a triumph.
I’ve been a devotee of Nikolai Foster’s stylish revival of Annie – perhaps the schmaltziest, most winningly spirited musical ever fashioned by American hands – since its 2011 premiere in Leeds. I caught it again on tour two summers ago, when Craig Revel Horwood took the cartoon villainess role of dipsomaniac Miss H – very fine he was too – and I suggested it was high time the capital had a butcher’s. More than that, though, I’m a fan-boy of La Hart; for me she can do no wrong, precisely because she’s that rare bird, a comedian who’s unafraid to muck it all up, courting embarrassment as she fails to get to grips with “adulthood”.
Half gorgon, half goofball, all round pleasure, she daftly-deftly combines menace with physical comedy, lurching into view through scary-tall dormitory doors, sending her grubby young charges screaming as if from a fire-breathing dragon. There’s no well-hello-there, to-camera cosiness. With disarrayed auburn curls and slatternly polka-dot nightgown, she bears tyrannically down on Ruby Stokes’s Annie – one of three alternated leading little ladies, sporting a grin as tight and fixed as her ginger pig-tails. Deriding the latter’s hopes of being collected by the parents who abandoned her, Hart’s grande dame sans merci drawls with a sly, equine smile: “That was 1922, this is 1933. They must have got stuck in traffic!”
The person who’s stuck though, of course, is Miss H. And whether it’s seeing her lewd, self-deluded advances to the laundry-man, or wailing out her girl-reviling solo, or slumping to the floor, emptying a gin-bottle down her throat, Hart gets to, well, the heart of the matter. This lonely creature’s growling distaste for the cute orphans expresses self-disgust: they remind her of what she could have been.
A huge hit on Broadway when it opened in 1977, twice thereafter making it to the big screen, the musical (score by Charles Strouse, lyrics by Martin Charnin, book by Thomas Meehan, all, incredibly, still going, despite advanced years) offers high fairy-tale escapism as it piles on the punchy numbers. It lays on the potential for creepiness too, only narrowly avoided here, by showing ageing billionaire Oliver Warbucks being bewitched and emotionally enriched by the puppyish incomer. The further suggestion that Annie’s can-do attitude gives FDR the idea for the New Deal is tongue-in-cheek risible; yet maybe, at core, it’s not wholly far-fetched – when we go to the ballot-box, aren’t we inspired by thoughts of the next generation?
Choreographer Nick Winston ensures the two-hour shebang is as nimble-footed as its long-installed (arguably superior) West End rival Matilda – even the Labradoodle playing Annie’s sidekick stray Sandy doesn’t put a paw wrong. My 12-year-old daughter Anna (admirer of the mirabile Hart, spokes-girl for the Miranda generation) came out beaming, albeit shrewdly wanting Alex Bourne’s Warbucks to be sterner at the start.
Perfect, then, as anticipated, for the summer and the school-holidays but, more unexpectedly, for these jittery, fear-filled times too; a potent juvenile rallying cry to resist hard-knocks and fight back.
Annie is playing at the Piccadilly Theatre. Book now at tickets.telegraph.co.uk or call 0844 871 2118