Press Release
Leapin' Lizards! The national tour of the beloved Broadway musical ANNIE will come to the North Charleston Performing Arts Center October 28th – 30th, 2022. Tickets will go on sale Monday, September 12th at 10 am online at Ticketmaster.com and at the North Charleston Coliseum Advance Ticket Office. Ticket prices start at $45 (plus applicable fees). For groups of 10 or more, email Groups@NorthCharlestonColiseumPAC.com.
The show is part of the 2022-2023 Best of Broadway series at the North Charleston Performing Arts Center.
This new tour of the iconic Tony Award®-winning production is directed by Jenn Thompson, who at the age of 10 stepped into the role of “Pepper” in the Original Broadway production. Scenic designs for the touring production are by Wilson Chin, whose work was most recently featured on Broadway in the critically acclaimed production of Pass Over.
“This show, with its iconic title character, continues to delight generations of theatre-lovers old and new by joyfully singing directly into the face of great adversity with perseverance, guts and guile,” said director Jenn Thompson. “For decades, ANNIE has continued to shine brightly, not only as an appeal to our better angels, but also as an example of the thrill of hope, hard-won: promising a better ‘Tomorrow' not only for Annie herself, but for all who need her message now more than ever.”
TROIKA Entertainment's COO and Executive Producer, Kori Prior adds, “We are thrilled and excited to have Jenn Thompson helm this new tour of ANNIE. She brings such admiration and connection to the material that we know this production will be fresh, new and full of the heart that makes ANNIE the show we all love.”
A multi-week city tour schedule beginning in the fall of 2022, as well as the full design team, will be announced later this spring. For more information, visit AnnieTour.com. For tour booking inquiries, please contact booking@bondtheatrical.com.
Holding onto hope when times are tough can take an awful lot of determination, and sometimes, an awful lot of determination comes in a surprisingly small package. Little Orphan Annie has reminded generations of theatergoers that sunshine is always right around the corner, and now the best-loved musical of all time is set to return in this new production – just as you remember it and just when we need it most. This celebration of family, optimism and the American spirit remains the ultimate cure for all the hard knocks life throws your way.
Hailed by the Chicago Tribune as, “one of the best family musicals ever penned!”, ANNIE features the book by Thomas Meehan, music by Charles Strouse and lyrics by Martin Charnin. All three authors received 1977 Tony Awards® for their work.
By permission of Tribune Content Agency, LLC, ANNIE is based on Harold Gray’s popular comic strip “Little Orphan Annie” which premiered in the 1920s in the New York Daily News and became one of the most widely read strips in the 30s and 40s. Lyricist-director Martin Charnin bought a coffee table book called “The Life and Hard Times of Little Orphan Annie” as a Christmas gift for a friend in 1970. The clerk at the bookstore was too busy to wrap the book, so Charnin took the book home to wrap it. Instead, he read it and fell in love with the strip and set out to secure the rights. The friend never got the book.
The original production of ANNIE had its world premiere on Aug 10, 1976 at the Goodspeed Opera House (Michael J. Price, Executive Director) and opened on Broadway on April 21, 1977 at the Alvin Theatre (Neil Simon theatre). It 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). It closed on Broadway after playing 2,377 performances. ANNIE was revived on Broadway in 1997 and again in 2014. It has been made into a film three times (1982, 1999, 2014) and was most recently featured as a live television production on NBC. The show remains one of the biggest Broadway musical hits ever; it has been performed in 28 languages and has been running somewhere around the world for 37 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.”
