PATRICK HEALY
NYT SYNDICATE
AT the final dress rehearsal this month for the new Broadway revival of Annie, an invited audience of friends and family cheered wildly when Katie Finneran, the Tony Award winner and acclaimed stage comedienne, burst through a door in her first entrance as the boozy orphanage manager, Miss Hannigan. The applause had unintended consequences, however. As Finneran recalled, she was unnerved by the audible expectations and started “acting like Miss Hannigan on crack” – shouting her opening line (“Ah-ha, caught ya!” as Annie is running away) and camping it up from there. By the curtain call Finneran felt she had reduced Miss Hannigan to comic relief rather than playing her as “a tough, desperate woman out of a Eugene O’Neill play,” which is partly how she sees the character.
The next day she and the show’s director, James Lapine, had a long talk.
“James basically told me, ‘Trust the story, and remember the subtlety we’ve worked on,”’ she said.
At the show that night, this time before a paying audience, Finneran felt more grounded but still far from the nuanced portrayal she wants to achieve before the musical opens on November 8
“The hardest thing in musical comedy is to be economical with my performance, to avoid being overthe- top for the sake of it,” Finneran said. “I’m feeling more pressure about Annie than anything else I’ve done.” The pressure is all about expectations – for both the actress and the character. In the last decade Finneran has become one of Broadway’s best scenestealers, beating legends like Estelle Parsons and Angela Lansbury for supporting actress Tonys for her performances as a ditsy blonde in the 2001 revival Noises Off and a drunken barfly in the 2010 revival of Promises, Promises. Now, at 41, Finneran is finally a leading lady in a major Broadway musical, with perks like her first car service – as well as the scrutiny of the spotlight. Some theatre bloggers have accused her of recycling alcoholic bits from Promises to play the hard-drinking Hannigan, while others have praised her for bringing out the lovelorn dreamer in the Depression-era character.
Dorothy Loudon won the Tony for best actress in 1977 for her creation of Hannigan as a blowzy old maid in the original Broadway run (beating Andrea McArdle as Annie), and Carol Burnett received a Golden Globe nomination for slurring her words and bulging her eyes throughout the 1982 film adaptation. Less successful was Nell Carter in the 1997 Broadway revival of Annie; critics panned her as too mean, the production too dark, and it closed after only seven months.
The creators and producers of Annie consider Miss Hannigan so important to its success that they initially discussed several bigger stars than Finneran for the role. Tony winners Christine Ebersole (Grey Gardens), Patti LuPone (Gypsy) and Betty Buckley (Cats) were on an early list, said Thomas Meehan, the show’s book writer, and television celebrity Rosie O’Donnell pursued the part and auditioned.
Even so, Finneran won the role virtually on the spot at her audition last spring. Seven months pregnant, she delivered a sexy and droll turn performing Miss Hannigan’s solo number, Little Girls.
“At first we felt like we needed a giant name in the role to sell tickets for a big Broadway house, so someone like Cher had to play Miss Hannigan,” Lapine said. (Cher was indeed mentioned by associates, Lapine said, but he never took the idea seriously.) “Katie has not been the main event in a show before, but she gave an audition that showed Miss Hannigan as a younger and still hopeful woman who was suffering under all those orphans. You could see that she would get to a really interesting place in the role and she would make an interesting production.” A great audition does not guarantee success, however; Finneran herself had trouble recalling what she did right in her audition for Promises, Promises when rehearsals began a year later for the Broadway run. She eventually found her way back to the character, Marge MacDougall, and her Act II opening scene with the star Sean Hayes was the highlight of Promises for many critics. Ben Brantley of The New York Times called her a “comic volcano” as Marge.
And Hayes is among those with high expectations for her new part, writing in an email: “When I heard that she was cast as Ms Hannigan, I think I had the same reaction everyone from Broadway had – ‘of Course, Katie Finneran! And the Tony goes to ...”’ If the pressure is on Finneran, the challenge of creating a new Hannigan and mastering that performance is more complicated than the usual bouts of nerves and memory slips. Growing up in Chicago and then Miami, she was diagnosed with spatial dyslexia, a learning disorder that made reading books, organising thoughts and writing essays into taxing experiences, she said. To this day Finneran sings the alphabet to herself when she is looking for a book in a store; doesn’t know the order of the months; and relies on her husband, actor Darren Goldstein, to handle finances. (They have two sons, the 20-month-old Ty and the newborn Wes.) The spatial dyslexia is compounded by attentiondeficit disorder, Finneran said, exacting a toll on her abilities as a performer. Memorising lines “is a terribly uncomfortable process for me,” she said, and even straightforward choreography can take days to master. At an Annie rehearsal last month, Finneran peppered Lapine with questions and requests for reminders about line deliveries and stage blocking during scenes between Hannigan and her brother Rooster.
“I always worry that people think I’m flaky, but learning lines and then understanding the action of a line or the body movement – all of those things together is like a whirlwind for my brain,” Finneran said later during an interview, stretched out on a plush sofa in the couple’s modestly sized two-bedroom apartment near the theatre district. As Wes squirmed on her lap, Finneran rubbed his back as she described reading a series of books called Teach Yourself Visually that finally emboldened her to learn to play a guitar or use a computer.
Nothing has given her more confidence, though, than the lifelong certainty that she belonged in the theatre, she said. After her parents – a stockbroker and gym teacher – moved her and her brother to Florida, she became friends with some other young theatre lovers, and they would act out scenes from Annie and her other favourite ‘70s musical, Sweeney Todd. She recalled liking Annie’s songs but identifying more with another orphan, Pepper, the sarcastic one.
“She’s an outsider who wants to be part of the group, which I’ve always related to,” Finneran said.
“Her lines are sassy, and she’s a whippersnapper, and that’s me, too.” Still, Finneran has never considered herself particularly funny. Even with her expressively bright green eyes, malleable face and pratfall instincts, Finneran repeatedly credited writers with creating material she could bring to life.
