HIT MUSICALS Tony-winning Annie writer a go-to of Broadway
THOMAS MEEHAN 1929-2017
Thomas Meehan, who died aged 88, won Tony Awards for writing the books for three of the most successful Broadway musicals of the past 40 years — Annie, The Producers and Hairspray.
Meehan was one of the go- to writers of Broadway, amassing book-writing credits that included the Christmas- themed musical Elf (written with Bob Martin and adapted from a 2003 film) and most recently Rocky (with Sylvester Stal- lone and adapted from his 1976 Oscar-winning movie).
At the time of his death Meehan was r e working the musical version of Mel Brooks’ movie Young Frankenstein, first seen on Broadway in 2007, for a revival in London.
Thomas Edward Meehan was born on Aug. 14, 1929, in Ossining, N.Y., and grew up across the Hudson River in Suffern. After graduating from Hamilton College in 1951, he secured an entrylevel editorial job at The New Yorker Given opportunities to write for the magazine, he produced a short story titled Yma Dream, which got the attention of Anne Bancroft, Mel Brooks and the lyricist Martin Charnin. They teamed up to work with him on a television adaptation and the connections would prove fruitful.
In 1972, Charnin asked Meehan if he would want to work on a musical. Meehan said he was game. But then Charnin told him his idea: to adapt the comic strip Little Orphan Annie. Recounting the genesis of the show in an article in The New York Times in 1977, Meehan wrote that his reaction was swift and succinct: “You’ve got to be kidding,” he told Charnin.
But he eventually agreed to give it a try, and once he read the comics, he realized that it would be harder than he had thought.
“Although I’d read Little Orphan Annie as a child in the 1930s,” he wrote, “I’d forgotten that it was basically nothing more than a series of totally improbable adventures, in which Annie, for example, was stranded on a desert isle or lost in the jungles of South America or held prisoner in a waterfront warehouse by a Fu Manchu‐ like Oriental madman.
“We’d set out to write a realistic, three- dimensional musical,” he continued, “and what I had to work from was a series of unrealistic, two- dimensional, two- inch squares.”
The musical the men eventually fashioned with Charles Strouse, who wrote t he music, took five years to get to Broadway. But once it did, in 1977, it ran for 2,377 performances. Today it is a staple of American musical theatre.