Charnin, won Tony for ‘Annie,’ dies at 84
Martin Charnin, who made his Broadway debut playing a Jet in the original “West Side Story” and went on to become a Broadway director and lyricist who won a Tony Award for the score of “Annie,” has died. He was 84.
Charnin’s death Saturday came days after he suffered a minor heart attack, his daughter, Sasha Charnin Morrison, told The Associated Press.
“He’s in a painless place, now. Probably looking for Cole Porter and Ira Gershwin,” Morrison wrote Sunday on Instagram.
Charnin was a keeper of the “Annie” flame, protective of what he created with songwriter Charles Strouse and book writer Thomas Meehan. The 1977 original won the Tony as best musical and ran for 2,300 performances, inspiring tours and revivals.
Charnin attributed the success of “Annie” in part to its sweet optimism and its message that things were going to get better, he told AP in 2015.
“We were living in a really tough time. Right in the middle of Nixon. Right in the middle of Vietnam. There was an almost-recession. There was a lot of unrest in the country and you can always feel it and a lot of depression — emotional depression, financial depression. We wanted to be the tap on the shoulder that said to everyone, ‘It’ll be better.’”
Born in New York, Charnin initially set off on a career in fine arts. He was an arts major at The Cooper Union when a friend invited him up one summer at an adult camp in the Adirondacks to wait on tables and act as an extra.
“I got bit,” he would say later.
But his career returned again and again to “Annie.” He directed 19 productions of the show, including national tours and shows in the Netherlands and Australia. He led a new version on an American national tour in 2015. He was very protective of it and messing with “Annie” meant messing with Charnin.