[In the second part of my report on NBC’s Annie Live!, I cover the rest of my assessment of the performance, focusing on the physical production, and then report on my survey of the published critical reception. ROTters who are just picking “Annie Live! (NBC, 2 December 2021)” up should go back to 7 January and read Part 1, which covers the background of the play and the NBC telecast, a summary of the plot of this version, and the first segment of my assessment.
[Readers will see, in that latter segment, that nearly all the reviewers, regardless of their outlet (newspaper, magazine, entertainment periodical, website) focused on the same elements of the show. The reviews ranged only slightly—no outright pans or raves—and the same elements in the production came up over and over again (Connick’s bald pate, the disappearance of Sandy from the stage, the acrobatic dancing of the child actors, and, to a lesser extent, the faulty camera work).]
I have little to say about the physical production. Though there was an audience present, the performance was filmed on a television sound stage, not in a theater. It was a large, circular space, which was fine for the 360-degree view the cameras provided us out in TV Land. The set-up also made for quick and seamless transitions, which was important for a precisely time-limited TV broadcast.
One amusing consequence of this stage circumstance: When Annie first arrives at Warbucks’s mansion, she asks if people “really live here or is it a train station?” She could have been commenting on the performance venue as much as the fictional locale. A little metatheatrical joke, unintentional though it may have been.
The open nature of the stage, of course, called for a fragmentary and suggested set rather than anything realistic, but that’s not out of line for any musical play, which must leave room for dancing—and Annie Live! included lots of large, ensemble dances.
(One small set-related quibble—and I can’t fathom why this happened at all. Both deBessonet and Rudzinski should have caught it and had Jason Sherwood fix it immediately. The U.S. flag that formed the backdrop of the Oval Office scene with Roosevelt and Warbucks, when Annie bucks the prez and his cabinet up with a rendition of “Tomorrow” and FDR coins the signature label for his administration, The New Deal—is a 50-star Stars and Stripes from 1960! In 1933, there were still only 48 states.)
As far as I was concerned, this all worked fine.
So did Tazewell’s costumes. Perhaps Miss Hannigan’s glad rags were a little over the top, what with her cat’s-eye glasses (on a lanyard, no less) and her big hair, but that was fitting for Henson’s portrayal.
My survey of reviews of Annie Live! shows the response to have been mixed. Some writers seemed to have been distracted by technical issue like camera movements and sound problems, which I didn’t cover, and others with the plot issues like those I mentioned. Others took the whole show into account and found it entertaining and even delightful.
Coverage of Annie Live! seems to have extended beyond U.S. borders. Claudia Smith of the London Daily Mail was almost entirely positive about the broadcast (with “a few minor technical glitches” noted). Claudia Smith was mostly taken with the work of Celina Smith, it seems.
Reviewer Smith dubbed actress Smith’s performance “mesmerizing,” writing that she “stunned” in the role and gave a “powerful performance” of “Tomorrow.”
She also found that the orphan ensemble “mesmerized the audience with a synchronized dance number” and pronounced Henson a “commanding presence” who “did not hold back when she belted out her song Little Girls.”
Scherzinger “put on an elegant, sophisticated display” as Grace Farrell and “dazzled when she danced and sang.”
Back home, Emily Yahr observed in the Washington Post:
Unless you’re a fan of musicals or happened to be seeking some family-friendly programming on Thursday night, you probably tuned in to NBC’s “Annie Live!” for one reason: to see if it would be a train wreck.
Yahr affirmed that “we can report that it was completely fine. Perfectly pleasant, even,” dubbing Smith “clearly the breakout star and often surpassed the singing ability of the adults around her.”
Smith, the WaPo entertainment reporter determined, was “surrounded by other very talented child actors . . . who exuded theater kid energy to the highest level.” She labeled Henson “terrific . . . in her role” and reported that Connick and Scherzinger “did very passable jobs.”
While generally positive about the show, Yahr does get very specific about some of the problems (several of which I also mention): Connick’s “bald cap,” the camera glitches, the dog that just “disappeared,” and Annie’s “wild” plot.
In the New York Times, Noel Murray, a freelance writer whose articles about film, TV, music, and comics appear in the Times and other publications, asserted that, even after 44 years since Annie was on Broadway, “The material still plays.”
Sticking close to the 1977 Broadway original, reported Murray, Annie Live! didn’t “disappoint in any significant way.” Indeed, he effused, “If anything . . . it was a treat to watch a lot of talented people gather in one place to sing and dance their way through a bipartisan fable” (Warbucks is a “proud Republican” who’s buddies with FDR, the newly-elected Democratic president).
The Timesman gave “a lot of credit to NBC’s two winning leads,” Smith and Connick. “The supporting performers kept the evening from slipping too far into stodginess,” felt Murray. “Henson followed in the footsteps of great scenery-chewing Hannigans like Carol Burnett [1982 film] and Nell Carter [1948-2003; 1997 Broadway revival], playing the character as a chaotic force of malevolence.”
The review-writer noted
occasional gaffes in blocking, with actors or crew members momentarily obstructing shots. In general, the visual side of the show felt a little repetitive, relying on many of the same tight frames and sparse sets, over and over,
but they seem not to have spoiled his overall reception of the production.
Murray dubbed the musical “feel-good entertainment” and noted that,
aside from the multiracial cast and a pointed, crowd-pleasing, post-pandemic mention of “Broadway getting back on its feet,” NBC’s “Annie” stayed pretty firmly stuck in the past. It was not, in any overtly apparent way, a comment on the modern world.
(A note about the line the Times writer quoted above: Connick may have been referring to the COVID-era Broadway comeback, but Warbucks was talking about the Great Depression. In any case, the line got a huge applause from the studio audience.
(Along with Annie’s question about the train station, it’s another instance of Annie Live! conflating the play’s fictional setting with the real world in which it was being performed. Warbucks’s line was an intentional allusion; Annie’s was a serendipitous accident.)
Murray concluded:
So perhaps it was only proper that this musical about earnest, plain-spoken yearning arrived on TV in 2021—when it would hit the hardest—instead of in 2013 [when The Sound of Music Live! was presented, NBC’s first foray into the world of live broadcasts of Broadway musicals]. This show may be dated by design, but when it’s clicking, it can still clear away the cobwebs and the sorrow.
In USA Today, Patrick Ryan revealed that “it didn't exactly spark excitement this summer when NBC announced it would” present Annie Live! on television. “If you're bringing back ‘Annie,’” admonished Ryan, “you’d better have a star who can shine like the top of the Chrysler Building.”
(Those last words are part of the line Miss Hannigan uses to threaten the orphans if they don’t scrub their dorm to her satisfaction: “If this floor don't shine like the top of the Chrysler Building . . . .” It’s the cue for “It’s the Hard-Knock Life.”)
“But our skepticism dissipated minutes into the network’s ‘Annie Live!’ on Thursday night,” added Ryan, “as young triple threat Celina Smith took the stage to sing ‘Maybe,’” the show’s opener. Smith, USA Today’s writer felt, “brings a world-weary sadness and almost desperate optimism to her otherwise chipper character.” Ryan predicted, “Factor in her easy confidence, infectious smile and powerful, crystal-clear voice, and it’s only a matter of time until Smith’s name lights up a Broadway marquee.”
Ryan credited the productions success to “Smith’s star-making performance,” but also praised “her consummate castmates.” Scherzinger “brings palpable warmth and pathos to the often thankless role of” Grace “and delivers one of the night’s few genuine showstoppers in the jazzy ‘We Got Annie.’”
He also praised Burgess and Hilty for their “perfect balance of cheese and sleaze, . . . while the orphans’ thrilling ‘It’s a Hard Knock Life’ was enough to make us wish Annie never left the orphanage.”
Ryan complained that Connick’s “stilted acting made Warbucks more awkward than endearing, and felt that Henson “doesn’t merely chew the scenery as the villainous orphanage head—she swallows the whole proscenium in a shrieking, mugging turn that whiffs on all the punchlines.”
This reviewer, too, had complaints about the physical production, noting that the “the bare-bones design” marred the presentation of “N.Y.C.” “The production’s cameras also frequently dropped into frame and obscured the actors,” reported Ryan, “while mic issues left some inaudible.”
In conclusion, Ryan determined:
But what it lacked in style, “Annie Live!” ultimately made up for in heart, with indelible showtunes and a winning lead performance that left us grinning. And after all, you’re never fully dressed without a smile.
Kathryn VanArendonk and Jackson McHenry, on Vulture, the website run by New York magazine, declared, “Annie Live! really hit the thematic nail on the head.”
Vulture’s reviewers deemed, “The NBC version was not perfect; it suffered from rushed pacing early on and strange stilted momentum toward the end.” They warned everyone that Connick’s “uncanny bald cap . . . would haunt his every scene.”
Nevertheless, the two writers held that “Celina Smith was fantastic in the lead role, supported by a stellar ensemble of Annie’s orphan friends dancing their hearts out.” Smith. the pair felt, “brought a clear voice and all the sunny enthusiasm necessary to carry the show.”
They praised the kid dancers for “[f]lipping all over the stage, bouncing on the mattresses and hard knock life-ing it all over the place, but miraculously not running into each other and hard-knocking their brains out.” They complained, though, about that “breathless pacing,” which deBessonet set “as if . . . to make sure the TV audience didn’t get bored.” Too much was lost as a result, they found.
The tandem reviewers caviled that “Henson’s Hannigan was all big silly thirst and not enough sadness and threat,” but praised Connick’s Warbucks because he could actually sing, as opposed to his film predecessors, who usually weren’t singers at all.
(VanArendonk and McHenry had several more “Highs” and “Lows,” but one hits a musical number that had me thinking—in a different vein, but never mind that. They liked that “the oft-cut ‘We’d Like to Thank You Herbert Hoover’” was left in because, “It’s important for the kids of today to learn about the existence of Herbert Hoover through song.”
(I don’t know about that, but as it was being sung, when Annie’s out of the orphanage the first time and comes upon a Hooverville, a shanty town the homeless built during the Great Depression, for which President Hoover (1874-1964; 31st President of the United States: 1929-33), the Republican incumbent who was defeated in 1932 for a second term by FDR, was widely blamed. The final verse ends with the lines “You dirty rat, you Bureaucrat, you / Made us what we are today.”
(I wondered if Margaret Hoover, the great-granddaughter of Herbert and the host of PBS’s conservative interview show Firing Line, had ever seen Annie when this song was included. She was born the same year that the original Annie opened, so it’d have to have been a revival. It’s not part of the soundtrack of any of the previous screen adaptations.
(By all accounts, she’s very proud of her family background, and I kept wondering if she’d ever heard this song, which is very derogatory toward her ancestor.)
In Variety, Daniel D’Addario observed that, coming at an opportune moment for the show that Annie Live! is, “made its goofy eagerness to be liked, and its occasional raggedness, into assets.”
“The show’s staging,” D’Addario felt, “allowed songcraft and showmanship to be the stars; numbers played out against minimalist backdrops.” In his view, “The scant amount of stage dressing . . . seemed intended to rhyme with the show’s message of scrappy resilience and high-spirited hope.”
He judged that despite “the resources of NBC, it was possible to believe that this was something like the best sort of community theater.” The Variety reviewer determined that this way, “certain flaws could get written off.”
D’Addario pointed out Connick’s “surrealistic bald cap” and noted his “occasionally being a beat behind on lines” and his “iffy styling.” He stepped around these kinds of faults, however, because “[i]t feels unsporting . . . to pick on a production that seemed so resolutely determined to entertain—and one whose key flaws may be inherent in the source material, a show one loves, if one does, because of its flaws as much as despite them.”
The review-writer called Scherzinger “polished” and Burgess “lightheartedly wicked” and said that “Henson’s performance as an unusually vituperative Miss Hannigan—[was] alternately both brutally nasty and deliriously pleasure-seeking.”
“Smith’s performance,” affirmed D’Addario, was “the most intriguing of contrasts. While she was certainly polished, hitting her dance cues with aplomb and in strong voice, Smith was . . . appropriately kid-like. She brought to ‘Annie Live!’ sweetness and a certain naivete, an innocence to the machinations of adults around her that seems essential to the part.”
Entertainment Weekly’s Maureen Lee Lenker and Lauren Huff opened their notice with a reminder: “You're never fully dressed without a smile—and Annie Live brought plenty to our faces.” They labeled the broadcast “a feel-good, rousing rendition of crowd-pleaser Annie.”
Lenker and Huff averred that “NBC crafted a fantastic production with a stellar cast that made for a touching reminder of why this show is a gateway to musical theater for so many kids,” but also expressed the opinion that “[i]t’s hard to mess up the winning score from Charles Strouse and Martin Charnin.
The two writers went on to list “the many, many highs from this big-hearted confection,” which included “It's the Hard Knock Life” with the orphans “adding in aerial stunts, flips, and a superb stepping sequence”; “Easy Street” with Henson, Hilty, and Burgess “warbling and strutting their way through its jazzy strains”; “getting to watch Connick Jr. tinkle the ivories”; and “Newcomer Celina Smith,” who “carries the show,” “[a]t turns, adorably cheeky and heartbreakingly vulnerable.”
Daniel Fienberg, paraphrasing Stephen Sondheim, lamented in the Hollywood Reporter, “Annie isn’t good or bad, it’s just nice. It’s a warm cup of a cocoa-flavored beverage that lacks enough natural ingredients to call itself ‘chocolate.’”
Feinberg pointed out that the play is “crazily front-loaded and just keeps doing reprises of its three best songs . . .; that Daddy Warbucks is a character with no arc at all; that Miss Hannigan, indisputably the best character in the show, vanishes for most of the second act; and that it’s presented as a happy musical in which . . . a creepy rich guy excitedly [tells] a small child that her parents are actually dead and not a pair of rubes with the last name ‘Mudge.’”
“These, of course,” continued the HR writer, “are problems with Annie as a musical and not necessarily problems with NBC’s Annie Live! Then Feinberg affirmed, “They just also happen not to be problems that director Lear deBessonet had any power to mitigate, and problems that definitely don’t get better when you have NBC breaking for commercials every seven or eight minutes.”
Feinberg reported that “if I’d stopped watching Annie Live! [after the first 20 minutes] and called it a night, NBC would have had a minor triumph on its hands.” In that time, he had enjoyed
Celina Smith’s thoroughly winsome rendition of “Maybe”; a group of orphans krumping and cartwheeling their way through “It’s a Hard Knock Life”; the introduction of Taraji P. Henson’s slithering interpretation of Miss Hannigan as The Grinch Who Tried to Steal an Orphan’s Christmas; one very well-behaved dog; and Smith belting out the anthemic “Tomorrow.”
In the end, though, the HR reviewer asserted, “The audience in the venue was happy to be there and the audience at home was probably happy to have live TV musicals back. And when everybody is happy to be happy, Annie is right in its element.
“Quibbles aside,” Lowry continued, “the show boasted considerable talent, with young Celina Smith ably filling the title role after a slightly shaky start.” The CNN reviewer added, “Taraji P. Henson also gamely dove into the juicy role of Miss Hannigan . . . with Tituss Burgess and Megan Hilty providing an extra boost of theatrical flair.”
Lowry ultimately judged that
“Annie” benefited from its sheer unpretentiousness, offering the can't-miss (or at least miss entirely) combination of cute kids, buoyant dance numbers, a little girl with a big voice, that trademark red dress, and of course a very well-trained dog who shows up just long enough to make everyone swoon.
Valerie Complex of the entertainment industry news website Deadline found that Annie Live! was “somewhere in the middle” of NBC’s foregoing live telecasts of a Broadway musical, “with several positive elements and equally negative ones.”
“The Annie Live! ensemble is simply fantastic,” effused Complex. “They are the most exciting part of the show and the glue holding the production together. These talented people don’t miss a beat.” She singled out “their ode to President Hoover’s downfall,” which she found was “harmonized to perfection.”
The Deadline writer singled out Scherzinger’s performance and the song “You’re Never Fully Dressed Without a Smile.” She objected, however, to the emphasis on Warbucks’s being a Republican—even though she acknowledged that it’s mentioned in most of the other incarnations of the play.
Complex pointed out that the production “isn’t perfect.” She noted, “The staging of the set is sometimes awkward. Some shots show audience members sitting behind set pieces with no way to see what’s happening in front of them.” The reviewer also reported that “the show starts with shots out of focus and shaky and that aren’t rectified until 90 minutes in.”
“While Annie Live! doesn’t always fire on all cylinders,” Complex felt, ”a story of hope and belonging is undoubtedly what the country needs right now. And for many Annie fans, this version will hit the spot.”
On the Daily Beast news website, senior entertainment reporter Kevin Fallon was of the opinion that “we have reached peak ‘it’s nice to watch something nice’ television.” He explained:
We’ve spent these [last two] years giving thanks for the diverting, wholesome antidotes to our cynical, nihilistic existence. Quality doesn’t matter when the public service is this essential: making us feel happy in spite of [gestures at the world (insert original with Fallon)] all of this.
Then Fallon got specific: “Annie Live! was a good version of the musical Annie. That isn’t intended as a compliment.” He even asks, “[H]ow have we gaslit ourselves into thinking Annie is a good musical?” But the Daily Beast reporter backed off a little:
I can make fun of so many aspects of Thursday night’s Annie Live! broadcast on NBC, but those things are an issue with the material itself and, mostly, not to do with the wholesome enthusiasm with which the production was mounted.
Fallon went on to list and characterize some of the performances of Annie Live! that he appreciated, but he actually apologized for posting what he labeled “a messy review.” This was due to the fact that “I’m not even really panning the show. I genuinely loved all three hours of watching Annie Live! on Thursday night.”
I’m going to skip the Daily Beaster’s specifics—he said largely what most other reviewers wrote about the NBC production (Celina Smith’s singing and acting performance, Harry Connick Jr.’s prosthetic pate, Nicole Scherzinger’s talent, Taraji P. Henson’s performance, the kids, and the song “N.Y.C.”)—so I can report what he was really writing about: “But Annie Live! was bad. And I hate myself for saying it. I feel like I’m not allowed to say it.”
“We’re still in this space where we are supposed to appreciate the effort and intention of anything like this,” posited Fallon. “Everything is darkness, and here are some talented people trying to bring some light.”
“I’m just more curious about when we’re going to allow ourselves to have standards again. I’ve appreciated nice things for a while now. . . . And Annie Live! isn’t just a holiday event, but something worth adjudicating as television.”
Here’s Fallon’s final statement. It’s flabbergasting:
Then
again, who is the asshole who is going to write the “That Annie Thing They Did on NBC for Families to Watch Together Was Bad” piece? I guess, at this point, it’s me.
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