Old Redhead Is Back

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

TITLE: ANNIE WARBUCKS

AUTHORS: MUSIC BY CHARLES STROUSE; LYRICS BY MARTIN CHARNIN; BOOK BY THOMAS MEEHAN

WHERE: OFF-BROADWAY

THE BOTTOM LINE: Same orphaned kid, same doggy pet tricks, same bald tycoon, but definitely not the same joy.

The 1977 moppet-meets-millionaire musical Annie reaped $380 million at the box office and, with stock and amateur productions, turned into an annuity for its creators -- which is a good thing, because none of them have had much but flops onstage ever since. Not surprisingly, they decided to try to make lightning strike twice. Alas, the sequel that opened off-Broadway last week provides at best a mild spark. It is pleasant, tuneful, funny and fit for whole families. It just doesn't make spectators tingle.

The show begins right where the last one left off, with the plucky orphan gamboling around a Christmas tree with her adoptive plutocrat. In steams a social-welfare commissioner with a bad attitude, played by Alene Robertson as a cross between Bella Abzug and Shelley Winters at their coarsest. The adoption is invalid, she tells Daddy Warbucks, because he doesn't have a wife. The rest of the show is devoted to marrying him off and extracting him from the tentacles of the adhesive and ambitious commissioner. Along the way father faces financial ruin, daughter runs away and turns hobo, a potential wife plots to murder both, and Franklin D. Roosevelt gets, as he drolly hums it, "all dolled up" for a soigne soiree on the Staten Island ferry.

Several things are wrong with this amiably unpretentious fable. First, after repeatedly failing to reach Broadway, the creators have opted for a postage- stamp stage in lower Manhattan. The sets are mostly paintings on roller- drops, slowly uncoiling to the floor ("It looks like we're in the 19th century," admits one of the team privately), and choreographer Peter Gennaro has no room to move. The use of Theoni Aldredge's Broadway-budget costumes just makes the surrounding skimpiness look worse.

Money has nothing to do with the failures of the plot, revamped in incident but not much in basic devices since its disastrous 1990 Washington tryout. While the first act twists and surprises, the bland second act feels eternal.

Most ruinous, title actress Kathryn Zaremba, a nine-year-old from Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, is loud and clear but never vulnerable or soft -- she's like Ethel Merman at her brassiest, without the compensating musicality, rather than a cuddlesome child. By the end there's hardly a wet eye in the house.