Annie, Quarry Theatre, West Yorkshire Playhouse (From The Northern Echo)

Theatre Review: Annie, Quarry Theatre, West Yorkshire Playhouse

5:23pm Monday 12th December 2011 in Reviews By Steve Pratt

I ALWAYS approach Annie with apprehension. A musical with orphans, a dog and a song – Tomorrow – that you find yourself singing involuntarily, has the potential to rot your teeth with sweet sentimentality and the aaah factor of cute child performers.

Happily, director Nikolai Foster adds enough grit to offset the more sentimental elements in this superlative revival of the show about little orphan Annie and her adventures in America during the Great Depression.

It’ll still make you laugh, make you cry and send you home with a nice warm glow, but it will also remind you that this is a time when the economy is broke and there’s mass homelessness. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Sophie Downham (alternating the role with Phoebe Roberts) is a redhaired, pint-sized package of dynamite as Annie as she copes with all the bad things life throws at her.

Good things too, like being taken in by billionaire Daddy Warbucks (Duncan Preston, a sort of Santa in a pin-stripe suit).

Annie even meets President Roosevelt in the White House, although whether he came up with his New Deal to revitalise the country as a result of Annie singing Tomorrow is perhaps debatable.

She’s certainly glad to escape the “hard knock life” at the orphanage run by drunken Miss Hannigan (excellent Sarah Ingram). Verity Rushworth is kooky as Warbuck’s PA, while Emma Barton and Darren Bennett are cartoon-like wicked as the heartless pair who pose as Annie’s parents.

If there’s a better staged and performed, more lavishly and lovingly produced Christmas show in the region I’ll adopt Annie myself.

• Until Jan 21. Box office 0113-2137700 and online wyp.org.uk