Miranda gets to the heart of Miss H
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, 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 comfort zone – horrible NYC orphanage manageress Miss Hannigan. OK, so she’s no Imelda Staunton, but singing and hoofing, she’s a triumph.
I’ve been a devotee of Nikolai Foster’s stylish revival of Annie 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. I’m a fan of La Hart; for me she can do no wrong. She’s that rare bird, a comedian who’s unafraid to muck it all up.
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. 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. 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 solo, or slumping to the floor, emptying a gin-bottle, Hart gets to the heart of the matter. This lonely creature’s 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 offers fairy-tale escapism as it piles on the punchy numbers. It lays on the potential for creepiness, too, only narrowly avoided here, by 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 vote, aren’t we inspired by thoughts of the next generation?
Choreographer Nick Winston ensures the two-hour shebang is as nimble-footed as its (superior) West End rival Matilda. Even the Labradoodle playing Annie’s sidekick, 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.
Perfect, then, for the summer holidays but, more unexpectedly, for these fear-filled times, too; a potent juvenile rallying cry to resist hard knocks and fight back.