Beloved Musical ANNIE to Return to the State Theatre Next Month

The U.S. National Tour of ANNIE, now in its third smash year, will return to the State Theatre in Easton on Friday, February 24. Directed by original lyricist and director Martin Charnin for the 19th time, this production of ANNIE is a brand new incarnation of the iconic Tony Award-winning original.

Show time is 7 p.m. Tickets are $65 & $59 and can be purchased by visiting the State Theatre Box Office, 453 Northampton Street, Easton, by calling 1-800-999-STATE, 610-252-3132 or online at www.statetheatre.org. Sponsored by Hotel Bethlehem and Strahman Valves. Part of the Butz Celebrates Broadway Performance Series and the Family Series sponsored by Capital BlueCross.

ANNIE has a book by Thomas Meehan, music by Charles Strouse and lyrics by Martin Charnin. All three authors received 1977 Tony Awards for their work. Choreography is by Liza Gennaro, who has incorporated selections from her father Peter Gennaro's 1977 Tony Award-winning choreography.

The celebrated design team includes scenic design by Tony Award winner Beowulf Boritt (Act One, The Scottsboro Boys, Rock of Ages), costume design by Costume Designer's Guild Award winner Suzy Benzinger (Blue Jasmine, Movin' Out, Miss Saigon), lighting design by Tony Award winner Ken Billington (Chicago, Annie, White Christmas) and sound design by Tony Award nominee Peter Hylenski (Rocky, Bullets Over Broadway, Motown). The lovable mutt "Sandy" is once again trained by Tony Award Honoree William Berloni (Annie, A Christmas Story, Legally Blonde). Musical supervision and additional orchestrations are by Keith Levenson (Annie, She Loves Me, Dreamgirls). Casting is by Joy Dewing CSA, Joy Dewing Casting (Soul Doctor, Wonderland). The tour is produced by Troika Entertainment, LLC.

The production features a 25 member company: in the title role of Annie is Tori Bates, an 11-year-old actress from Sarasota, FL, making her tour debut. She most recently starred as Young Josephine in the sold-out run of Josephine at Asolo Repertory Theatre.

Gilgamesh Taggett continues to star as Oliver Warbucks. In the role of Miss Hannigan is Erin Fish. Also starring in the tour are Casey Prins as Grace Farrell, Michael Santora as Rooster, Mallory King as Lily and Jeffrey B. Duncan as FDR. Sunny and Macy, rescue terrier mixes, star as Sandy.

The orphans are Bunny Baldwin as Molly, Jacqueline Galvano as July, Ava Slater as Kate, Amanda Swickle as Pepper, Amanda Wylie as Tessie and Katie Wylie as Duffy.

The featured ensemble includes Timothy Allen, Todd Berkich, Katie Davis, Adam du Plessis, Mia Fitzgibbon, Caroline Lellouche, Conor McGiffin, Mackenzie Perpich, Connor Simpson, David Vogel, Anastasia Wolfe and Roxy York.

The original production of ANNIE opened April 21, 1977 at the Alvin Theatre and went on to win the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Musical, seven Drama Desk Awards including Best Musical, the Grammy for Best Cast Show Album and seven Tony Awards, including Best Musical, Best Book (Thomas Meehan) and Best Score (Charles Strouse, Martin Charnin). The show remains one of the biggest Broadway musical hits ever. It ran for 2,377 performances after it first opened, and has been performed in 28 languages and has been running somewhere around the world for 39 years.

The beloved score for ANNIE includes "Maybe," "It's the Hard Knock Life," "You're Never Fully Dressed Without a Smile," "Easy Street," "I Don't Need Anything But You" and the eternal anthem of optimism, "Tomorrow."

ABOUT THE ARTISTS:

Martin Charnin (Director, Lyrics) is celebrating his 60th year in the entertainment industry, which began in 1957 when he created the role of Big Deal (one of Jerome Robbins' authentic juvenile delinquents) in the original company of West Side Story. He played the role for exactly 1,000 performances. Since then, he has been involved in over 148 theatrical, television, film, and night club productions as a director, producer, composer, or lyricist. He is one of the dozen people who has won Emmys, Tonys, Grammys, Drama Desk Awards, New York Drama Critics Awards, and the Peabody Award for Broadcasting. Annie, which came to Broadway in 1977, originally ran for 2,377 performances, and has been revived there three times. He has directed Annie 19 times (after directing the original production in New York), in London, Montreal, Amsterdam, and Melbourne as well as Annie's 15 national U.S. companies. He has collaborated with Charles Strouse, Vernon Duke, Marvin Hamlisch, Mary Rodgers, and twice with Richard Rodgers on I Remember Mama and Two by Two. He has written for, or directed, Fred Astaire, Ethel Merman, Jack Lemmon, Ann-Margret, Jack Benny, Anne Bancroft, Betty Hutton, Sutton Foster, Sarah Jessica Parker, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Bebe Neuwirth, Barbra Streisand, Johnny Mathis, Larry Kert, Chita Rivera, Jane Lynch, Tony Bennett, Jason Alexander, and Jay-Z, among countless others, and for his wife, Shelly Burch (who originated a leading role in the original company of Nine), and who opened her new one-woman-show at the famed Broadway Bistro, 54 Below, in 2014. Last year, "Tomorrow" from Annie became one of the 100 most performed musical numbers of the last century. He currently has 4 musicals that are "circling over Kennedy," getting ready for production in New York. They include Love is Love, Robin Hood, Something Funny's Going On and a revival of Annie Warbucks, the continuation of the Annie saga, which originally opened Off-Broadway in New York in 1993. His most recent musical is called Wallenberg, a musical drama about the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who single-handedly saved the lives of 100,000 Jewish souls during the Holocaust.

Thomas Meehan (Book) is a three-time Tony Award-winning book writer for the Broadways musicals Annie, The Producers and Hairspray. In addition, he has written the books of a dozen or so other Broadway musicals, including Richard Rodgers' I Remember Mama, Cry-Baby, Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein, Elf, Chaplin and most recently Rocky (with Sylvester Stallone). A long-time contributor of humor pieces to The New Yorker magazine and an Emmy Award-winning TV comedy writer, he has also written a number of screenplays, most notably for To Be or Not to Be and Spaceballs. He is a member of the Council of the Dramatists Guild.

Charles Strouse (Music) A graduate of New York's P.S. 87, Townsend Harris H.S., and the Eastman School of Music, Charles has studied composition with Aaron Copland, Arthur Berger, and David Diamond in the US and Nadia Boulanger in Paris. Charles has composed copious chamber music, two piano concertos, a string quartet and two operas. After which, being broke like most composers, he was a rehearsal pianist and dance arranger for many shows, played in bar rooms, ballet classes, at weddings and strip joints (a particular boon for one who was to write the music for the film The Night They Raided Minsky's). One morning in 1960 he awoke to find he had written (with Lee Adams and Mike Stewart) Bye Bye Birdie (Tony Award), which is still among the most performed musicals in America, followed by Golden Boy with Sammy Davis, Jr. (Tony Nomination). Then came, Applause (Tony Award), It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's Superman, Rags (Tony Nomination) and Annie (Tony Award). In-between, there have been scores for movies including Bonnie and Clyde and All Dogs Go to Heaven. Throughout his career, Charles has received the Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein, Frederick Lowe and the Leonard Bernstein Awards for musical achievement. He is married to director/choreographer Barbara Siman and is the father of Benjamin (attorney, author, composer), Nicholas (psychotherapist), Victoria (screen writer) and William (also a screen writer.)

Liza Gennaro (Choreographer) has choreographed extensively on Broadway, Off-Broadway and in Regional Theaters including: The Booth Theatre, The Broadhurst Theatre, Roundabout Theatre, Actor's Theatre Of Louisville, The Old Globe, Hartford Stage, Guthrie Theater, The Goodspeed Opera House, Pioneer Theatre, Paper Mill Playhouse and The St. Louis "Muny" Opera. She is a member of the SDC Executive Board and a Tony Award Voter. Her chapter, "Evolution of Dance in the Golden Era of the American 'Book Musical'" appears in The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical and a new chapter, co-written with Stacy Wolf, "Dance in Musical Theatre" appears in the upcoming Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater. Liza has taught at Barnard College and Princeton University. She is currently Co-Head of the Musical Theatre BFA Indiana University, Department of Theatre, Drama and Contemporary Dance.

Pictured: Issie Swickle as Annie and Sunny as Sandy in "Tomorrow". Photo by Joan Marcus.

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