★★★★☆
Blind optimism is no cure-all for life’s nasty surprises, but now more than ever we could do with a dose to help to get us through the day. And so while its chief selling point — the West End debut of Miranda Hart — is actually one of the less impressive elements of this Annie (she has comic charisma, while not looking entirely convinced by herself as the nasty orphanage manager Miss Hannigan), Nikolai Foster’s revival is otherwise just what the doctor ordered.
Slickly staged, buoyantly performed, motored by cracking musical set pieces and an expert mixture of naivety, whimsy and wit, it puts a smile on your face and a tear in your eye.
Well, a tear in my eye certainly, which puzzled my daughters, aged 9 and 12, who were more likely to coo at the cross-stage dashes of Sandy the dog and wow at the spirited, uncloying performances by seven girls of roughly their age as the singing New York orphans. Yet there is something in this 1977 musical by Charles Strouse, Martin Charnin and Thomas Meehan that knows how to unlock your emotions.
On paper, after all, it’s wish fulfilment at its plainest: in the midst of the Great Depression, the never-say-die, ginger-haired orphan Annie meets a kindly billionaire who vows to adopt her. And that, give or take, is that. Are we ever too old not to want to have all our problems solved by a kindly billionaire?
Yet the storytelling is a finely judged mixture of celebration and satire, of nasty villains (Jonny Fines and Djalenga Scott as the spiffily dressed Rooster and Lily) and good-hearted authority figures you would like to think were in charge (Russell Wilcox as Franklin D Roosevelt, inspired to create New Deal economics after hearing a reprise of the show’s big tune, Tomorrow).
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Nick Winston’s choreography and Colin Richmond’s design gives us the 1930s New York of our dreams, and as Annie goes to the cinema with the sweetie-pie industrialist Daddy Warbucks and his delightful assistant Grace (Alex Bourne and Holly Dale Spencer, both excellent), a slightly muddy opening leads into a show perfectly poised between the sappy and the self-aware.
Ruby Stokes, one of the three girls playing Annie in this run, is demure and indefatigable. She has a small frame, but a big singing voice. She’s terrific. And, yes, although Hart’s singing is spirited rather than slick, although her American accent is highly perishable, you’re glad of her comic brio in those moments when she suggests Hannigan as a gin-glugging wreck rather than a gorgon.
Hart gets top billing, but really it’s a colourful cameo. The show is the star. And its mixture of open-heartedness, wit and pizzazz enables the little orphan inside us all to see off our enemies. For a couple of hours, anyway.
Box office: 08448 717630, to January 6, 2018