Thomas Meehan

Tony Award-winning writer behind musical smash hit Annie

Thomas Meehan, Broadway legend. Born: 14 August, 1929 in Ossining, New York. Died: 22 August, 2017 in Greenwich Village, New York, aged 88

Three-time Tony Award-winning writer Thomas Meehan, who transformed the Little Orphan Annie cartoon strip into smash Broadway musical Annie, has died at the age of 88.

Long-time friend and Annie collaborator Martin Charnin said: “There’s a hole in my heart. It’s a gigantic loss, not only to the industry but also to us. We’ve been together and so close since the 1950s.”

Meehan wrote the books for three shows that ran more than 2,000 performances on Broadway – Annie with 2,377 performances, The Producers with Mel Brooks at 2,502 performances and Hairspray, which he wrote with Mark O’donnell and which reached 2,642 performances.

Meehan’s other shows include Young Frankenstein with Brooks, Cry-baby with O’donnell, Elf with Bob Martin, Chaplin with Christopher Curtis, Bombay Dreams with Meera Syal and the musical Rocky with Sylvester Stallone.

He began his career as a writer with The New Yorker’s Talk of the Town section and later earned an Emmy Award nomination in 1964 as one of the writers of the TV series That Was The Week That Was. “He was somebody who you could literally call a wit,” Charnin said. “There are not a lot of wits left in comedy and Tom was a wit.”

Meehan made his Broadway debut with Annie, alongside Charnin and songwriter Charles Strouse. The 1977 original won the Tony as best musical and ran for 2,300 performances.

Meehan is survived by his wife. MARK KENNEDY