Theater Review

All it takes is the orchestra’s overture to remind us why “Annie” holds a distinguished place in international musical history. The classic, catchy melodies of “It’s the Hard-Knock Life” and “Tomorrow” help transport children and adults to the lonesome but hopeful world of America’s favorite orphan and her determined, foot-stomping, mop-swishing friends. But the musical “Annie” is significantly different from the memorable 1982 movie starring Albert Finney as Daddy Warbucks and Carol Burnett as Miss Hannigan. And the current show revived by the original Broadway director and lyricist, Martin Charnin, takes a decidedly new approach to the familiar characters and moving story. The original Broadway production of “Annie” won seven 1977 Tony Awards, including best musical, book and score. It ran for 2,377 performances and is ranked as one of the 20 longest running shows in Broadway history. Now playing a limited-run at the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood through October 16, “Annie” stars Conrad John Schuck, who originally played Daddy Warbucks on Broadway and reprised the role for a recent Broadway revival. Miss Hannigan is played by Alene Robertson, who made her Broadway debut in “Annie.” Set in 1933 New York, during the Great Depression, the show highlights America’s struggle for stability, and the desperation of politicians and the streetwalkers alike. In this world, Annie’s optimism is not only unusual but also a bit extreme, as is the luxury of billionaire bachelor Oliver Warbucks’ estate in which the plucky red-haired orphan lands herself a’well, a new deal. Annie, played by Marissa O’Donnell, dreams that her biological parents who left her 11 years ago still love and will rescue her from the strict and dreary orphanage run by the wicked drunkard Miss Hannigan. An opportunity to spend a week with Warbucks is the key Annie needs to search for her parents, impress the outside world, and find a loving family. O’Donnell portrays the lovable, endearing Annie with her signature “ah-gee”s and “betcha”s. While maintaining a childlike ring, her singing voice is mature and solid, symbolic of her character’s inner strength. The young actresses who play Annie’s fellow orphan friends are a stellar crew, especially Lindsay Ryan who adds spunk to her role as the youngest child, Molly. Their version of “You’re Never Fully Dressed Without a Smile” best reveals their musical and dance talents, and when Miss Hannigan staggers in with “Did I hear happiness in here?” it feels like she’s referring to the audience’s applause. In the role of Hannigan, Robertson is less of a floozy Cruella de Ville and more like the villainous Ursula in “The Little Mermaid.” She struts and sways across the stage, letting it all out in numbers like “Easy Street,” accompanied by Scott Willis and Julie Cardia as the scheming duo Rooster and Lily St. Regis (played in the movie by the unforgettable Tim Curry and Bernadette Peters). A seemingly older Daddy Warbucks, Schuck is a natural musical talent, his experience revealed in the ease of his solo number, “Why Should I Change a Thing?” the new song by Martin Charnin and Charles Strouse incorporated into the production for the first time. One of the best scenes is undoubtedly Act II’s NBC radio show at Rockefeller Center, with Bert Healy, The Boylan Sisters and the Hour of Smiles Family. Annie and her Daddy Warbucks appear on the show to announce a reward for Annie’s parents, and an awkward Warbucks, unrehearsed and inexperienced, inadvertently performs a commercial. The drama of the live radio broadcast, with Healy’s deep show voice and the accompanying sound effects, as well as the visible goings-on behind the mic’with the playful dummy and flirtatious Boylan Sisters, is a show in itself. Actor Christopher Vettel captures the Bert Healy character, representative of radio personalities of the time. It was interesting to hear the children in the audience laugh not only at the orphans’ aggressive personalities and “Miss Hannigan” jokes but also at the political commentary’for example, when F.D.R. and his Cabinet members tease Warbucks about being a Republican. Perhaps kids are more aware of political jive than one would think, which might be reflective of today’s polarized political society. When Annie delivers her message that a better tomorrow “is always a day away” in the President’s Oval Office, Harold Ickes (played by Harry Turpin) sings the theme song with exaggeratedly funny hand gestures. Her message is inspiring, despite the unbelievable idea that with it she reaches the president and unites the two political parties; most people are more like the other orphans who still have to shout from the bottom. Annie’s canine companion Sandy, played by Lola, makes too few appearances in the production, and I missed the interaction between the two. Miss Hannigan’s underlying protective care for Annie, revealed at the end of the 1982 movie, is also absent in the musical. At times, the show feels more like a rags-to-riches story than the powerful tale of love I remember. The show runs through October 16. Tickets are $25 to $68, and are available online at www.BroadwayLA.org, by calling Ticketmaster at (213) 365-3500, or at the Pantages Theatre Box Office, 6233 Hollywood Blvd.

By EVELYN BARGE Palisadian-Post Intern The walls of Jeff Lantos’ fifth-grade classroom at Marquez Elementary are plastered with memorabilia from nearly 20 years of teaching’collages, drawings, poems and thank-you notes. Most prominent are the hundreds of photos and playbills from student theater productions, which Lantos directs three times a year as a way for his students to learn more about history by becoming immersed in it as actors and singers. Lantos not only writes and produces all the fifth-grade musicals, but has also recently expanded his literary repertoire to include a historical children’s novel about the life and adventures of John Smith that was published by AuthorHouse last spring. Village Books will host a signing of “My Adventures with John Smith,” next Thursday at 7:30 p.m. during which two of Lantos’ former students will act out excerpts of the novel. Another former student, Kristen Sorensen, drew the cover illustration. “This book grew out of the fact that I teach John Smith as part of my history lessons,” Lantos said. “I thought this would make a great story.” During his research, Lantos said he discovered that most people know very little about Smith’s life outside his relationship with the Native American princess Pocahontas. “Pocahontas was really the last chapter of his life. Before that, he led an adventurous life similar to Indiana Jones.” The book chronicles many of Smith’s lesser-known adventures, from his stint as a hero in the Turkish-Hungarian war to his sale into slavery in Constantinople. Smith escaped from slavery and went on to become a cartographer, a pirate and, eventually, the president of the Jamestown Colony in the New World. Lantos said the children’s book was four years in the making. He devoted his summers to working on the novel but had to stop the writing process each fall to return his focus to teaching at Marquez. “You get into a kind of trance,” he said of the writing process. “You may be talking to someone, but you can’t hear them, because your mind is always on the book.” Lantos said he struggled to find a balance between the historical facts and the fictional elements that make a strong narrative. “I wanted to be true to the facts, but with a narrative thrust and dramatic build.” To aid the narrative flow of his story, Lantos introduced a fictional narrator, Mel the parrot who gives a first-hand account of Smith’s adventures. Mel acts as the adventurer’s wisecracking sidekick and therapist. Lantos often turned to the experts, his own fifth-grade students, for feedback on drafts of “My Adventures with John Smith.” He said he recognized their boredom or unresponsiveness to sections of the book as a sign that those passages needed more work. Now, Lantos is incorporating the published version of the novel into his history lessons. Many of his students have responded with praise for the new book. “It makes history fun,” said fifth-grader Emma Jackson. “It’s really funny, too. The parrot tells you all about his adventures with John Smith.” Other students said reading from the novel is helpful because it parallels the content of their history textbook and class. “It’s the same thing we’re learning in history class,” said Jake Weston. “It helps you understand it better.” Lantos hopes they keep turning the pages. “I want them to understand that when you’re studying history the key is to get past the timelines and dates and boldface type. If you can do that, it’s going to be as exciting as any movie or TV show.” “My Adventures with John Smith” is just the most recent of Lantos’ endeavors to get students fired up about history. The teacher has devoted much of his professional career to finding creative ways of transforming basic classroom subjects like history, math and literature through the arts. “Ask any fifth grader who’s not in my class what they think of history,” he said. “They’ll tell you it’s boring. But there is a palpable change in the mood of the class when you don’t just tell them you’re going to learn history, but you tell them we’re going to sing a song or we’re going to put on a play. Then they get excited about learning.” Using this teaching philosophy, Lantos leads his fifth graders in three musical productions each year. Lantos wrote all of the musicals with scores by composer Bill Augustine. In December, the students perform “Miracle in Philadelphia,” about the Constitutional Convention of 1787. In March, the students put on “Hello Louisiana” about the Louisiana Purchase and the Lewis and Clark expedition. In June, they perform “Water and Power,” which focuses on the Industrial Revolution and the struggle for workers’ rights. Lantos also compiled a guide for teachers incorporating drawing and art into American history lessons. The guide, “Read, Draw, Remember: American History Activities,” was published by Scholastic in 2003 and features many of his students’ drawings as examples. “Anytime you combine the arts with other subjects, the kids will buy into it and enjoy it and retain it longer, which is the key,” Lantos said. The extra effort to help students uncover a love of history is all in a day’s work for the fifth-grade teacher who has been at Marquez Elementary since 1987. “Bringing joy into a student’s life on the stage or by putting up their piece of art makes a lifelong learner,” he said.

When Alan Chapman greets the Chamber Music Palisades audience to deliver his pre-concert notes, it’s more fireside chat than dense analysis. Known by many classical music lovers for his mellifluous voice as host of KUSC’s afternoon show, Chapman also provides pithy insight on the content of the local chamber series, co-founded by pianist Delores Stevens and flutist Susan Greenberg, Now embarking on its 9th season, Chamber Music Palisades has managed to explore an expansive set of musical resources built around a given group of instruments, piano and flute. “Part of what dictates the program is personnel, which is the wonder of Chamber Music Palisades,” Chapman says. “If you have an established quartet, it becomes the core of what they do, but here the only constants are Dee and Susan. If it suits their purposes for a singer or string quartet, they’ll do it.” Chapman has provided commentary on the programs from the outset. “I knew Susan through the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra,” says Chapman, who produced the L.A. Chamber’s concerts and hosted that group’s pre-concert comments for 13 years. Different from the format of the Pacific Symphony and the Los Angeles Master Chorale, for which Chapman previews the entire program at the outset, with CMP, he comments on each composition before it is played. He stands casually in front of the audience with a hand-held microphone and provides a context for the piece, a way of approaching the music that will make listening to it a better experience. “I’m tipping you off, opening the door on this piece for you. I’m the connector between you and the piece. “From time to time, I am approached by people who are offering no money or not enough, and think I talk off the top of my head,” Chapman says. “I could do that, but I don’t want to do that.” Indeed, his comments, anecdotes and insights belie a thorough and scholarly preparation. Although Chapman has been involved in music since his childhood in Poughkeepsie, New York’he played piano, bass and guitar and joined the union at 16’he was more interested in math and science in high school. He went off to MIT, but rapidly changed his intentions, ultimately majoring in music with a minor in German literature and behavioral science. The next stop was Yale, where he earned his doctorate in music theory and moved to California with a lead on two job positions listed for a Ph.D. in music theory. He took the Occidental job, although years later he would be teaching at the other school, UCLA, where he currently teaches the art of listening. In preparing his commentary for the Chamber Music Palisades season, Chapman factors in an audience with a lot of experience as concert-goers and listeners. “The wonderful thing about this series is that it’s almost guaranteed that you will hear really good music that you’ve never heard before, apart from the commissioned works. When I’m out in the patio during intermission, people are talking about the music and there is a lot of enthusiasm, a great connection between the music and the audience. The audience is really there with it.” Chapman credits Stevens and Greenberg with putting together an incredible spectrum of chamber music. “They look at the cast of characters and figure out how they are going to be grouped. How are the colors going to be put together?” In preparing his comments, Chapman says that he tries to penetrate the soul of the music by asking “Why do a bunch of notes do something for you?” He offers two examples from the first concert on October 18, which features Haydn’s Divertissement III in C Major for flute, violin and cello; C.P.E. Bach’s Quartet in G Major for flute, viola, cello and piano; Gernot Wolfgang’s world premiers of “Thin Air” for violin, viola and cello and Dvorak’s Quartet in Eb Major, Op 87 for piano and strings. “C.P.E. was the second of the elder Bach’s 20 children, four of whom became noted composers. Had you been in Germany in the latter 18th century, people would have assumed you were talking about C.P.E. not J.S. He sits in an interesting position, spanning the baroque to classical period. He lives through it and is really part of a new school with new values on how music should function, and in terms of mood swings he’s all over the place. “Dvorak is one of my favorites,” Chapman continues. “His chamber music is supreme. This piece was written when he was no longer a young man, yet there is so much variety and energy, at times it gets orchestral.” Chapman sings high praise for great chamber music. “When you listen to great chamber music well performed, I marvel at how much is possible with so few people. Chamber Music Palisades maximizes the resources available. How could you get more content?” Chamber Music Palisades opens its 9th season on Tuesday, October 18, 8 p.m. at St. Matthew’s parish, 1031 Bienveneda. Subscriptions are $80; single admission is $25, and students with current ID are admitted free. For information, contact: 454-4024 or 459-2070.

There’s no mention of him in Gardner’s “Art Through the Ages,” the art history student’s bible. Nor does his name appear in Janson’s “History of Art,” another major tome for the art lover. Yet painter Max Liebermann (1847-1935) was Germany’s most famous artist from the mid-1880s until the Nazi takeover in 1933. The Skirball Center hopes to reverse Liebermann’s little-known status among Americans with its major retrospective “Max Liebermann: From Realism to Impressionism,” now on view through January 29, 2006. The exhibition, the first international loan show organized by the Skirball, examines Liebermann’s legacy not only through his art, but almost by equal measure, through his role as a robust cultural leader whose life paralleled a time of profound artistic and political change. The descendant of a prosperous German Jewish family, Liebermann was a celebrity in his own day. He scaled the heights of artistic life, serving as president of the Berlin Secession from 1898 until 1910 and later, from 1920 through 1932, he was president of the Prussian Academy of Art during the Weimar Republic. Attaining such a position of civic authority was possible for a Jew only during this brief democratic period of German history. His stature came crashing down with the rise of Adolf Hitler. In 1933, he was forced to resign his distinguished post amid the rising tide of laws restricting the rights of Jews. When he died two years later at 87, the Nazi regime had succeeded in making him a non-person, with no notice taken of his death in the German press. In subsequent years, his widow, Martha, endured the seizure of the couple’s home and art collection’along with the vilification of her husband’s art as “degenerate”‘until she committed suicide in 1942. “Hitler’s coming to power in 1933 meant that the world of Liebermann’s 19th-century liberal political views was slated for extinction,” writes Marion F. Deshmukh in her exhibition catalog essay. “As a Jew, as a political moderate, and as a modern painter, Liebermann represented to the Nazis all that was ‘alien and un-German.'” Ironically, Liebermann defined himself as a German who happened to be a Jew, says Lori Starr, director of the Skirball Museum. “He was determined to help Germany not live in isolation but be tuned in to the larger international community. He collected modern art and introduced it to Germany.” “He was not only an important artist, but an important human being,” says Barbara C. Gilbert, Skirball senior curator of fine arts and curator of the exhibition. “He was very outspoken and people listened to what he had to say. He played a huge role in Berlin’s cultural community.” He and his fellow secessionists advocated artistic freedom, unhindered by politics or ideology. Their goal was to organize shows outside the official, government-controlled annual exhibitions. At the height of its influence, the Secession had 97 members, including many women, and 119 corresponding members including Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Wassily Kandinsky and Henri Matisse. Liebermann, himself a hardworking and prolific artist, created hundreds of paintings over his long career. Sixty paintings and a dozen works on paper are on view at the Skirball, ranging in style from his early Realist interpretations of Dutch peasant life, to stirring portraiture, to his individual take on Impressionism. He drew inspiration from wide sources: 17th-century Dutch masters Frans Hals and Rembrandt van Rijn; Jean-Fran’ois Millet and the Barbizon School, as well as contemporaries Edouard Manet, Edgar Degas, Lovis Corinth and Edvard Munch. The artist he revered most was Manet who, in Liebermann’s opinion “had the ability of painting what was old in a new way.” Liebermann first began studying art in the atelier of the Berlin painter Karl Steffeck in 1866. He later enrolled at the Weimar Art Academy and continued training in Paris. In the 1870s and 1880s, he used a Realist style to exalt the dignity of labor and the working classes. Liebermann suffered harsh criticism for these portrayals of rural life since they were considered at odds with the tradition of grand history painting favored by the conservative art establishment of Berlin. The artist gradually moved to a more modernist approach to painting, experimenting with new themes such as the leisure activities of middle-class urbanites. This shift is especially reflected in “Parrotman,” a 1901 painting rendered with new spontaneity. He also created strong, affecting portraits of family members and distinguished citizens. In his last 20 years of life, Liebermann turned to an in-depth study of the gardens at his lakeside villa in Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin. During these years, he developed his own brand of Impressionism, lightening his palette and starting to paint in a looser, more abstract way. He lived long enough to see Expressionism emerge as the dominant art movement. Emil Nolde, one of the leading German Expressionists, was critical of Liebermann, regarding his work, once thought to be progressive, as old-fashioned and traditionalist. “Although he and the emerging generation of German Expressionist painters often were at odds regarding art theory’-with Liebermann insisting on a basis of Realism and the Expressionists leaning towards greater emotionalism’Liebermann’s bold handling of subject matter, color and paint application would at times come to inspire these younger artists,” Gilbert says. Gilbert’s own inspiration for embarking on an eight-year exploration of Liebermann and his work came in 1997 when she made her first trip to Berlin as a courier for the painting “The Artist’s Wife and Granddaughter”(1926), the only painting of Liebermann’s in the Skirball’s collection. The painting was to be featured in one of three exhibitions held in Berlin to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Liebermann’s birth. “Like many American art historians, I had not seen many of his paintings,” Gilbert says. “It was a real eye-opener. People are used to seeing the French Impressionists, but here’s something new for them to see.” The exhibition will travel to The Jewish Museum in New York City, its only other venue, where it will be on view from March 10 through July 9, 2006. The Skirball has organized a wide range of exhibition-related programs. “The German Silent Film Series,” beginning October 20, will present six relatively unknown masterpieces of German films from the 1920s and 1930s, most screened with live piano accompaniment. Contact: 440-4500 or www.skirball.org.