Martin Charnin: Award-winning director and lyricist who brought ‘Annie’ to Broadway

The driving force behind some of the cheeriest songs in musical theatre, he had a long CV of stage credits

In a glittering career he won several Emmy and Tony Awards for his creative work (CBS/Getty)

Martin Charnin was a Tony- and Emmy-winning writer, director and producer who turned a Depression-era comic strip into Annie, the hit Broadway musical about a freckle-faced orphan with a “hard-knock life”.

He started out as a Broadway actor playing a Jet in the original 1957 production of West Side Story. He had responded to a casting call for “authentic juvenile delinquent”, he later said, but found he had little inclination for singing and dancing.

Within two years, he turned towards creative work behind the scenes, writing or directing off-Broadway revues for the impresario Julius Monk, as well as nightclub shows for artists including Shirley Jones, Abbe Lane, Leslie Uggams, Dionne Warwick and Nancy Wilson.

Collaborating with composers such as Richard Rodgers and his daughter Mary Rodgers, Charnin wrote the lyrics to Broadway musicals including Hot Spot (1963) and Two by Two (1970-71), and directed television variety specials that earned him three Emmy Awards in the early 1970s.

All the while, he promoted and developed what he described as an optimistic musical for a cynical time, crafting a show that chronicled the feisty orphan Annie and her dog, Sandy, the cruel caretaker Miss Hannigan, and the balding millionaire Oliver “Daddy” Warbucks.

With a book by Thomas Meehan and a score by Charles Strouse, Annie opened on Broadway in 1977 and ran for 2,377 performances, spawning two Tony-nominated revivals, three film adaptations and countless local theatre productions. The New York Times estimated in 2012 that 700 to 900 Annie productions run each year in the US alone.

In part, the musical’s success was driven by some of the cheeriest, most infectious songs ever performed on Broadway – including “It’s the Hard Knock Life”, which was sampled by rapper Jay-Z in 1998, and “Tomorrow”, in which Annie proclaims: “Bet your bottom dollar/ That tomorrow/ There’ll be sun!”

Charnin’s quest to stage Annie reportedly landed him $75,000 (£60,000) in debt by the time his musical opened on Broadway. He had first encountered the characters around 1970 (accounts vary on the year), when he came across a collection of Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie comics while shopping for a Christmas gift.

Few shared his enthusiasm for the idea. Charnin insisted on casting children and dogs, unnerving potential financial backers. He rebuffed suggestions that he stage the musical as camp instead of straightforward realism.

After an early version premiered in Connecticut in 1976, Charnin tweaked the cast and retooled the show, leading it to be picked up by director Mike Nichols, who produced it for Broadway. It was nominated for 10 Tony Awards, including Best Director, and won seven, including Best Musical, Best Book and Best Score, which Charnin shared with Strouse. He also shared a Grammy for Best Cast Show Album and reportedly made a fortune on the musical, which earned a profit of more than $20m and fetched a record $9.5m for film rights.

Charnin was unimpressed by the 1982 movie adaptation, directed by John Huston, and by subsequent films in 1999 and 2014. Remaining on Broadway, he received two Tony nominations for directing and helping the film critic Joel Siegel craft the book for The First, a 1981 musical that starred David Alan Grier as Jackie Robinson but closed after one month.

For the most part, he remained consumed by the red-haired moppet that launched him to national prominence. He spent years working on a sequel, reassembling the original Annie team for Annie 2 (1989), which premiered in Washington to disastrous reviews and was rewritten as Annie Warbucks. The production opened off-Broadway in 1993 and ran for 200 performances.

“Annie is riddled with joy, tempered by some satire, some sarcasm,” Charnin said in 2015. “Being optimistic is really not a bad thing to be. If you took it out of the equation of how you’d live, I think everything would be The Hunger Games.”

In his later years Charnin served as a guardian for the Annie character and story (Getty)

The older of two children, Martin Jay Charnin was born in Manhattan, New York, in 1934, and was raised in the city’s Washington Heights neighbourhood. His mother was a secretary, and his father was a basso profondo (a deep bass) at the Metropolitan Opera who wanted Martin to become an artist.

Instead, Charnin turned to theatre after graduating from Cooper Union in 1955. In addition to West Side Story, he appeared in the 1959 revue The Girls Against the Boys, alongside comic actors including Bert Lahr and Dick Van Dyke.

He later wrote the Barbra Streisand song “The Best Thing You’ve Ever Done”, as well as lyrics for the Broadway shows La Strada (1969), written with Lionel Bart and based on the film by Federico Fellini; I Remember Mama (1979), with music by Richard Rodgers and a book by Meehan; and contributed to The Madwoman of Central Park West (1979), a one-woman musical comedy starring Phyllis Newman.

Charnin conceived and directed Nash at Nine, a 1973 revue drawn from poetry by Ogden Nash, and also directed Broadway productions of A Little Family Business (1982), Cafe Crown (1989), Sid Caesar & Company (1989) and The Flowering Peach (1994).

On television, he won an Emmy Award for the Anne Bancroft vehicle Annie, the Women in the Life of a Man (1970), followed by two more Emmys for ’S Wonderful, ’S Marvelous, ’S Gershwin (1972), featuring Jack Lemmon and Fred Astaire.

In recent years, Charnin served as a guardian of sorts for the Annie character and story, directing at least 18 productions in addition to its original Broadway run.

His marriages to Lynn Ross and Genii Prior, who both danced in West Side Story, and to Jade Hobson, a creative director for fashion magazines, ended in divorce. In 2006, he married Shelly Burch, who starred in the soap opera One Life to Live and later appeared in nightclub shows directed by Charnin. He is survived by Burch and five children.

Martin Jay Charnin, theatre director and lyricist, born 24 November 1934, died 6 July 2019

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