Children steal the show

This is a comic book musical, based on the Depression-era tales of Little Orphan Annie. Left at a New York orphanage as a baby, she finally escapes the hated rule of Miss Hannigan (Judy Satrapa) in a bid to find the parents who left her with a locket and a note saying they would return. An encounter with the incredibly rich Daddy Warbucks (Don Bemrose) and his sweet but canny secretary Grace Farrell (Miranda Cookman) changes her life, despite the plots of Hannigan, her shady brother Rooster (Dim Ristevski) and his vacuous girlfriend Lilly (Maigan Fowler).

What Oliver! is to boy performers Annie is to the girls. Oliver! fills the stage with mournful little male thieves; Annie fills it with stroppy little female orphans, full of life and wicked humour. Such is the encouraging number of young female performers up for these roles, that Phoenix has been able to cast them twice over. On some nights audiences will see the Brooklyn Orphans; on opening night it was the Bronx Orphans, led very capably by Lydia Milosavljevic as the feisty, ever cheerful Annie.

It really is the children (and Annie's dog Sandy) who lift this show every time they are on stage and it would be good if the adult players rose more at times to match them. However, there are moments of real energy, like the radio show sequence with its amusing glimpses behind the scenes of broadcasting and Bill Lord's well-focused appearance as Roosevelt, getting to work, with Annie's help, on the New Deal. It's hard, too, to go past the genial well-sung charm of Bemrose's Warbucks, even if it's a little difficult to believe in him as a ruthless 1930s mogul.

The show is driven unerringly by Rose Shorney and her musicians in the pit. But it is almost three hours long and there ought to be a way to tighten up on the set changes. The orchestra plays through them, but the blackouts between scenes drop the energy. The set makes an imaginative use of movable flats to suggest different locales; moving these into place visibly as the characters come in for the next scene might push the show along a little more briskly.

It would be good, too, to see some awareness of lighting conventions for a musical like Annie. After the audience walks in on a beautiful lighting state on the wonderfully still and sleeping orphans, they really don't want to have moving lights throughout the show finding the next position by flashing into their eyes. And the orchestra play-out at the end deserves to have the atmosphere held by a lit stage, perhaps the lighting state with which it opened.

It's Annie and the orphans, however, along with the labrador Maverick as Annie's dog, that make this production worth a visit.