While separate projects took them elsewhere in the decades that followed, the often-produced Annie was a touchstone for the writers. I have a huge hole in my heart right now,” Charnin said. ![]() The musical fashioned a makeshift family for its trio of writers, who frequently reunited to celebrate Broadway revivals, tours, and several screen adaptations. The whole point of the musical is Annie discovering Daddy Warbucks, finding him, and being adopted by him-the finding of a family.” Daddy Warbucks and Annie begin together and stay together for the entire length of the comic strip. “The thing that was fascinating about the way we chose to do it is that we know nothing about Annie’s origin in the comic strip. We loved the '30s, and we thought the Depression was a rich era for us to make a musical,” Charnin said. Martha Swope / The New York Public Library Reid Shelton and Andrea McArdle in the original Broadway production of Annie. It was Meehan, who along with Charnin and Strouse, gave Little Orphan Annie an origin story, and fashioned New York City as another character in the musical. We’ve had a lot of success with that name.” It was the first television show I ever did, and Tom was a collaborator on that. ![]() I read his pieces over the course of the years, and I actually optioned a piece of his called ‘Annie, The Women in the Life of a Man’ as a 1970 TV project for Anne Bancroft. “He was a frequent contributor, and I was a subscriber. “I knew him from his work at The New Yorker,” Charnin told Playbill. It was his writing there that caught Charnin's attention, leading to his theatrical debut. Read: A DRINK WITH ANNIE CREATORS MARTIN CHARNIN, THOMAS MEEHAN, AND CHARLES STROUSEīorn August 14, 1929, Meehan attended Hamilton College before beginning his career as a writer with The New Yorker's “Talk of the Town” section. He is the only creative to have written the books for three shows that ran more than 2,000 performances on Broadway: the aforementioned Annie (2,377 performances), The Producers in 2001 alongside Mel Brooks (2,502 performances), and Hairspray in 2002, which he wrote with the late Mark O’Donnell (2,642 performances). The smash hit Annie, which ran for 2,377 performances, earned Meehan his first of three Tony Awards. ![]() Meehan was 47 when he made his Broadway debut, collaborating with Charnin and composer Charles Strouse on a stage musical adaptation of Harold Gray’s comic strip Little Orphan Annie.
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