Dreams fulfilled Trinity Rep’s bittersweet Annie BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

Here’s the question I went in with. Are you a cynic or a realist if you notice all the young girls in tow at Trinity Rep and say, Yup, they’re staging Annie for its Christmas Carol cash-cow virtues? The answer I walked out with — hearing more than a couple of adults admit they hadn’t expected to like it — is: How beside the point. If respectable musical theater can be made from audition hopefuls or even 1950s juvenile delinquents, why not from a comic strip?

No, Annie doesn’t reach for, say, the anti-racist commentary of South Pacific in its message to America, but its 1934 Depression setting has more to do with social conscience than period artifact. At least in this production it does.

How do we make America’s aspirational myths real? That’s the question this smart and clever production tries to answer. Set designer David Jenkins has a billboard remain at the back throughout. It declares: "There’s no way like the American Way" and "World’s Highest Standard of Living" as it depicts a family trio on a Sunday drive, a beaming little girl in the middle. By the time Annie reaches up and touches the father’s hand in Act Two, the sentimentality of the moment has been earned.

Act One, lights up, the first people we see are homeless. Before they eventually sing "Hooverville," its melody and huddled staging aptly in the style of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, they are tapping out time steps for us, accompanying the overture medley. They take their turns under individual spotlights, determined rather than joyful as they hoof away significantly solitarily. Clearly, this will be a bittersweet treat, not treacle.

Other productions of Annie have gone more for the cute in the tale, complete with obligatory curly red wig. Here, nuh-uh. From nearly 400 audition candidates, director Amanda Dehnert selected a low-key Annie. With lank hair that’s auburn instead of Day-Glo red, Andrea C. Ross delivers an attentive presence and a hauntingly beautiful voice. Instead of another Shirley Temple, we get an Annie whom we can watch the story through.

The storytelling does have a cartoon-panel sequence to it. Our spunky 11-year-old heroine is in an orphanage, where as an infant she was deposited with an apologetic note from her mother and half a locket. One night she escapes to search for her parents. A policeman brings her back to her colder, crueler world after she has been briefly befriended in a Hooverville by some equally deserving poor. Just in time. Billionaire war profiteer Oliver Warbucks (Fred Sullivan Jr.) has sent out his secretary (Angela Williams) to find an amiable orphan for a two-week Christmas visit. (And then what? Toss it back into the snow? As I said, shaky storytelling.)

Of course, Warbucks wants to adopt her. Fortunately, the musical doesn’t waste time on any phony suspense over that decision. But he proves his love by not insisting on it, after she reveals that her dream is to be reunited with her real parents. He announces a $50,000 reward for finding them, which attracts hundreds of pretenders.

The only greedy fakes who count are Rooster and Lily, characterized with outlandish voices and sinister glee by Mauro Hantman and Melissa D’Amico. The scoundrels are ready to take the money and toss the kid in a ditch on the way out of town, aided by the head of the girls’ orphanage, Miss Hannigan, who gives them the inside info they need. She is Rooster’s sister, and Janice Duclos gives a real meanness to her, a foot-weary end-of-day exasperation rather than a Carol Burnett adorability. Director Dehnert has her right off not only threaten to scissor off an ear of Annie’s floppy stuffed puppy but actually do it.

But this production is also looking at how American dreams can become actual. So we know that when Annie encounters the stray dog she names Sandy, she will leave her imaginary pooch behind, just as she is beginning to make her bigger imaginings come true.

Everything is at the service of Dehnert’s concern that amidst our being entertained we don’t lose track of the reality of the times and these characters’ experiences. Sharon Jenkins’s clever choreography even includes a long passage of angry stomping as the orphans sing "Hard-Knock Life." Another potentially cutesy number, when now-happier little girls sing "You Won’t Be an Orphan for Long," the still-parentless Annie remains glum through several choruses. The Warbucks servants have to turn into a marching band and all but dynamite her out of her lower-case depression.

With the aid of Warbucks and President Roosevelt (Brian McEleney) and the FBI, the parental mystery is solved. Sullivan is believably sincere as a humble billionaire, and at moments his singing voice sounds, fittingly, like a bullfrog doing Tom Waits. Crooning to Annie, he’s like a kid presenting some sweetly clumsy handmade gift.

Lying and truth-telling is a recurring motif in Annie, so it’s no wonder that in previews Dehnert tried out the downer ending of having the kid wake up back in the orphanage, the preceding just a dream. Thank goodness we’re back where we belong, with a happy (read hopeful) ending. The American Dream has everything to do with earned optimism, no matter the outcome — True Grit, not Manifest Destiny. Tossing an annual sure-fire crowd-pleaser into your season doesn’t diminish that if you do it honestly. No lie.