Broadway director, lyricist won Tony for score of ‘Annie’
NEW YORK — 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 a lyricist who won a Tony Award for the score of the hit “Annie,” has died at 84.
He died Saturday at a hospital in White Plains, N.Y., days after suffering a minor heart attack, daughter Sasha Charnin Morrison said.
“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 that have never gone out of style.
Charnin attributed the success of “Annie” in part to its sweet optimism and its message that things were going to get better. After all, it was written during a period of instability, he said 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 almostrecession. 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.’”
“Annie” nearly didn’t make it past the Goodspeed Opera House in Connecticut in 1976. But Charnin brought in noted stage and film director Mike Nichols, who signed on as a producer, and helped him revise the show.
With Andrea McArdle replacing Kristen Vigard as the red-haired moppet Annie and Dorothy Loudon added as Miss Hannigan, the production went on to open in New York in April 1977 with a bang.
The musical contained gems such as “Tomorrow” and “It’s the Hard Knock Life.” Charnin’s lyrics, which earned him and Strouse a Tony for best score in 1977, are playful and moving: “You’re never fully dressed/without a smile” and “No one cares for you a smidge/when you’re in an orphanage.”
The 1982 film version, which featured Carol Burnett in Loudon’s role, was not nearly as popular or well-received. A stage sequel called “Annie Warbucks” ran off-Broadway in 1993.
The original show was revived on Broadway in 2012 and made into a film starring Quvenzhane Wallis in 2014. Charnin, who won a Grammy Award for the “Annie” cast album, found shards of his work also included in Jay-Z’s 1998 Grammywinning album “Vol. 2… Hard Knock Life.”
“‘Annie’ has touched generations, and each one of the generations that it has reached has a very fond, distinct, specific memory of it. Because they love it — they don’t like it, they love it — they pass that memory on like a baton in a relay race,” Charnin said.
Born in New York, Charnin initially set off on a career in fine arts. He gave up a huge fellowship to go to Rome to paint in favor of life as a struggling actor. One day, he read that director Jerome Robbins “was looking for authentic juvenile delinquents” in an open call.
He went along among 2,000 wannabes, which became 200, then 20 and finally two. “I was one of the two,” he said. That’s how he made his Broadway debut as a Jet in “West Side Story” in 1957. He later played a waiter — and was a standby for Dick Van Dyke — in “The Girls Against the Boys” in 1959.
Three years later, he supplied the lyrics to the show “Hot Spot,” with music by Mary Rodgers. He also wrote lyrics for “La Strada,” a musical based on the Fellini film, but it closed after opening night.
Charnin had better luck with “Two by Two,” in 1970, which had music by Richard Rodgers, who also directed. The lyricist then became director of “Nash at Nine,” a short-lived revue based on Ogden Nash poems. He was nominated for several Emmys for directing variety shows for NBC, winning for “Jack Lemmon in ‘S Wonderful, ‘S Marvelous, ‘S Gershwin.”
Charnin’s reputation as a polished stage figure got him hired as the director of the new slapstick and envelope-pushing show “The National Lampoon Show,” starring Gilda Radner, Bill Murray and John Bellushi.
NBC executives went to see the show at the TimeLife Building and wanted to do a TV show like it. Around that time, Charnin had gotten the rights to the celebrated comic strip character Little Orphan Annie and declined the offer to direct the new NBC show. That show became “Saturday Night Live.”
With remakes, tours and productions all over the world, Charnin never saw his best-known work fall out of favor. He noticed that the appetite of “Annie” would increase during elections.
“‘Annie’ is riddled with joy, tempered by some satire, some sarcasm,” he said. “Being optimistic is really not a bad thing to be. If you took it out of the equation of how you’d live, I think everything would be ‘The Hunger Games.’”