Well-known Connecticut theater director helms the new tour of ‘Annie’ coming to the Shubert

The new tour of “Annie,” playing at the Shubert Theatre in New Haven from Feb. 29 through March 3, will be a time of sweet reminiscence for all the adults in the audience who are introducing their kids to the original stage version.

Some of the old-timers may know the show from its original Broadway run in the 1970s and 1980s or from the many tours that crisscrossed the country for decades. While the show continues to have hundreds of productions a year at schools and community theaters, there’s been a lull in major professional “Annie” productions. The Shubert stop is a chance to reconnect with the live show on a grand scale.

The tour is also a nostalgia trip for the show’s director, Jenn Thompson. An actor since the age of 7, she played the obstreperous orphan girl Pepper in “Annie” for two years on Broadway.

“I was in the first wave of kids replacing the original cast on Broadway,” she said. She left the company to make a movie, the Tatum O’Neal/Kirsty McNichol summer camp coming-of-age tale “Little Darlings,” then returned, then left again to be in the John Schlesinger film “Honky Tonk Freeway.” Thompson switched from acting to directing when she was in her 30s. She has worked at theaters in New York and throughout the U.S., but this is the first national tour she has directed.

“’Annie’ is a show that just lives in my DNA. I was careful how I went about it,” said Thompson, a longtime New Yorker who now lives in Ivoryton.

Connecticut looms large in this story. “Annie” had its world premiere at the Goodspeed Opera House in 1976. That first rendition didn’t go as well as hoped, but co-creator Martin Charnin’s belief in the show was contagious. The eminent director and play doctor Mike Nichols was among those who were invited to Goodspeed to see the nascent “Annie” and hopefully improve it. It opened on Broadway in 1977, and the rest is history. It ran in New York until 1983 and toured continuously from 1978 to 1983. There have been numerous revivals and tours since then, not to mention several movies and a couple of ill-fated sequels, “Annie 2: Miss Hannigan’s Revenge” and “Annie Warbucks.”

Thompson has her own connection with the Goodspeed. She’s been a regular director there for years, helming “Bye Bye Birdie” (which like “Annie” has a score by Charles Strouse), “Oklahoma,” “The Music Man” and “Anne of Green Gables.” She also spent much of her youth in the state, performing with her family in the River Rep summer stock company at the Ivoryton Playhouse.

“It was the ‘American Idol’ of its day,” Thompson recalled of her childhood “Annie” experience. “The auditions were a big open call with lines around the block.” She remembers it as a wonderful time. She has less fond memories of an “Annie” she did in 2000, where she played Annie’s kindly benefactor Grace Farrell and felt she was miscast.

“The director said he wanted a Jean Arthur type, but that concept never came up again,” Thompson said. “I felt like a duck out of water. That was the first time I’d returned to the show as an adult.”

In interviews and at “Annie” cast reunion events, Thompson said people would ask about certain scenes and would say, “I don’t know that part of the show. I never went into the mansion. I was an orphan!” When given the directing gig for this tour, she made a point of analyzing the whole show, particularly the non-orphan scenes. She also found that while she knew the show intimately, she’d be working with a choreographer and designers who had never seen “Annie.”

Thompson restored portions of the show that have been cut in most other versions. She’s most pleased to have brought back the full “cabinet scene” in which President Franklin Roosevelt cobbles together the historic New Deal recovery plan with his cabinet members. “It’s probably my favorite scene in the show, but in the other version I looked at, it had been pretty cut down. It’s not even in the ‘Annie Jr.’ version. But everybody goes crazy for a scene in which political leaders are coming together and getting along.”

The adult perspective can be crucial. The main theme of “Annie,” as Thompson sees it, is that “Oliver Warbucks doesn’t know how to be a dad. Parenting can be about sacrifice, not putting yourself first. When they meet, he’s a businessman. She’s an acquisition. He wants to acquire her.

“As a parent, as the parent of an adoptee, I have lots of ways into this.”

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Though it is set in the 1930s, some impressions of the show have been changed by current events. The show’s plot involved Annie being adopted by a mega-wealthy American capitalist icon named Oliver Warbucks, who by nature of being an outspoken politically connected rich dude bears some resemblance to a certain current Republican Presidential frontrunner. Thompson says the tour’s scenic designer Wilson Chin (who worked with the director at Goodspeed on “Oklahoma” and “Anne of Green Gables”) originally envisioned “putting a lot of W’s on everything,” the way Donald Trump places T’s on his buildings, but that was deemed too much. “Warbucks is a famous Republican, though,” she said. “It’s interesting to see how it plays in different parts of the country.”

She also was able to reset some common, if misguided, interpretations that had crept into the show. “Carol Burnett really changed Hannigan,” she said of the TV star’s looser, flirtier take on the musical’s main villain for the 1982 movie adaptation directed by John Huston. “She played her as a floozy and then others did it the same way. But if you go in that direction with Hannigan, it doesn’t leave space for Lily,” the other woman in the show who hopes to grab some of the Warbucks fortune.

Regardless of its various versions and TV/movie adaptions, “Annie” the musical has been the dominant “Annie” for 47 years, so much so that many of the show’s present-day fans may be unaware of the long legacy of “Little Orphan Annie” as a newspaper comic strip, which ran from 1924 to 2010. The strip hit the peak of its popularity during the time in which the musical is set, dramatizing the widespread suffering during the Great Depression and the hope for recovery. There was also a popular “Little Orphan Annie” radio show that ran from 1930 to 1942. In the comic strip and radio shows, Annie wanders off alone on many adventures, some human-scaled and heartfelt and others involving international intrigue or the supernatural, but her main friend and benefactor remains the millionaire industrialist Daddy Warbucks.

In her research for directing the tour, Thompson went back to the comics and radio shows for guidance. She also sought out the musical’s original script, which had been heavily revised for other revivals and reworkings such as “Annie Jr.” (the condensed version performed at schools). “I got permission from the heirs to go back to the original scripts. I felt it had taken on some weight over the years. I wanted to give it a haircut. It’s also how I heard it when I was in it.”

What she learned through her restoration was that some of the missing or changed lines or scenes erased or distorted some of the show’s balance and fluidity.

“There’s a lot of interesting twinning moments in this show,” Thompson explained. “’It’s a Hard Knock Life’ is like the kid version of ‘Thank You Herbert Hoover,’ the same kind of complaint song.” She notes that the role of Sandy, played by a live dog, grew over time, and the dog’s added appearance changed those scenes. Some scenes without Annie in them also fell by the wayside, leading to a situation where “the lead character never stops singing and never leaves,” Thompson said. Her production gives Annie a little break.

The Sandys in nearly all significant productions of “Annie” since the beginning have been overseen by Connecticut-based theatrical animal trainer Bill Berloni. That was true of this tour when it first set out two years ago, though Thompson said another company has since taken over the dog-handling duties.

Since the tour began, all the child characters including Annie have had to be recast due mostly to the young actors growing older and bigger. The current Annie is Rainey Treviño. The adults have remained mainly the same. Shubert audiences will see Christopher Swan as Oliver Warbucks, Stefanie Londino as Miss Hannigan, Julia Nicole Hunter as Warbucks’ associate Grace Farrell, Jeffrey T. Kelly as the scoundrel Rooster Hannigan, Samantha Stevens as Rooster’s “Easy Street” mate Lily St. Regis and Mark Woodard as President Roosevelt. There are seven other orphan characters besides Annie and a grown-up ensemble of nine more people. Sandy is played by a Wheaten terrier mix named Seamus and has a labradoodle understudy named Kevin.

Thompson’s pleased with the diversity of the cast. “Annie is Latina and nearly half the orphans are of color.”

With “Annie” in its second year of touring, Thompson has been consumed with other directing projects. She’s going to Arizona to do a production of Sam Shepard’s desert-set “True West” in an actual desert. Then she switches gears drastically to do the tearjerker “Steel Magnolias” in Aspen, Colorado. This is one of the rare years in the past decade that she’s not directing something at Goodspeed, or TheaterWorks Hartford for that matter, but said she’ll be doing shows here again soon.

Meanwhile, she’s still aglow from being able to revisit her youth as a precocious theater orphan in one of the biggest musicals of all time.

“Being in ‘Annie’ was the best job I ever had and the best job I ever will have,” Thompson said. Even being one of the “other” orphans had its advantages. “Even if you’re ‘Annie,’ she doesn’t get to sing ‘Smile,’” the musical’s second act showstopper. “Those of us who were in ‘Annie’ then, we are rarefied people. It’s like being an astronaut.”

“Annie” runs Feb. 29 through March 3 at the Shubert Theatre, 247 College St., New Haven. Performances are Thursday and Friday at 7 p.m., Saturday at 1 and 7 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. $64.30-$123.80. shubert.com.