Annie ran 2,377 performances on Broadway and won seven Tony Awards. Its first sequel never reached New York at all. Annie 2: Miss Hannigan’s Revenge had its premiere on December 22, 1989, at Washington’s Kennedy Center, where critics were close to unanimous in panning it, and the show was abandoned on the road.
The original was the work of composer Charles Strouse, lyricist Martin Charnin and book writer Thomas Meehan, the same trio who later wrote the second sequel. The star who came back for the first one was Dorothy Loudon, who had won the 1977 Tony for Best Lead Actress in a Musical as the gin-soaked orphanage boss Miss Hannigan.
Bringing back the villain
The title told audiences what to expect: the sequel was built around Hannigan rather than the orphan. In the original, Loudon introduced the showstoppers “Little Girls” and “Easy Street,” and her rehearsal-room improvisations reportedly produced lines that became part of the script. Centering a second show on her was a logical bet on paper.
Loudon was 64 when the sequel opened, a dozen years after her Tony win (1989 minus 1977). She had already lived through a short-lived Broadway flop and a show that closed on the road, so she knew the territory. Annie 2 became her second musical to close out of town, after Lolita, My Love in 1971.
What “out of town” means
Big Broadway musicals have long played tryout runs in other cities, letting writers cut songs, rewrite scenes and fix staging in front of paying audiences before New York critics weigh in. Washington’s Kennedy Center, on the bank of the Potomac, has served as one of those testing grounds.
For Annie 2, the tryout did its job in the harshest way. Extensive rewrites of the script and score failed to rescue it, and the plan to bring it to Broadway was dropped.
The second sequel: Annie Warbucks
The writers did not give up. They started over with a new plot and new songs, and the result was Annie Warbucks. This time Miss Hannigan was gone. The villain became Child Welfare Commissioner Harriet Doyle, who tells Daddy Warbucks on Christmas morning in 1933 that he must marry within 60 days or lose Annie to the orphanage.
A quick timeline shows how long the second attempt took:
- December 22, 1989: the Hannigan sequel starts its Washington run.
- 1990: the project is abandoned without a Broadway opening.
- February to April 1992: Annie Warbucks tries out at the Marriott Lincolnshire near Chicago, then tours five US cities.
- August 9, 1993: it opens Off-Broadway in Manhattan after a major investor pulled out of a Broadway plan.
- Final count: 200 performances, breaking Off-Broadway box office records for the time.
Even then the Broadway move collapsed. The producers lined up $2.5 million for a transfer, but a Tony rule required a show to move to an eligible theater within 30 weeks of its original opening. They missed the window, the investor walked away and Annie Warbucks stayed Off-Broadway.
Where the lost songs went
Annie 2 did not vanish completely. A double-CD cast recording tied to the 30th anniversary tour of Annie devotes part of its second disc to songs from the abandoned sequel, alongside numbers cut from the original show. For fans, that disc is the closest thing to hearing what Washington audiences saw in the winter of 1989.
For more Broadway backstage history, see how Meg Ryan joined Billy Crystal on the stage of his Broadway show 860, and the first photos of Julia Louis-Dreyfus on Broadway in Other Desert Cities.
Further reading
Image: Tom, CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.
