Annie: Veteran musical is getting a reboot, with new songs by Beck and R&B singer Sia

What do you do with a problem like Annie?

The makers of a new film of the 1977 Broadway musical, which will star Jamie Foxx and Cameron Diaz, are about to let us know. Intriguingly, they have not only updated its original Depression setting but its music, remodelling old songs and inserting new ones. The first evidence of their efforts is “You’re Never Fully Dressed Without a Smile” by Sia, an adaptable Australian, R&B-inflected singer-songwriter who has worked with Christina Aguilera, Eminem and Beck. Its video, with well-scrubbed, not exactly orphaned-looking kids plastering New York City with drawings of smiles while bullying passers-by into cracking them, suggests Annie’s saccharine content still requires a health warning in 2014.

Sia duets with Beck on Annie’s most promising new title, “Moonquake Lake”. “Opportunity”, “The City’s Yours” and “Who Am I” have also been shoehorned between more familiar songs. It begs the question of whether a musical should be refitted for changing times, and how Annie might work best in the 21st century.

The stage musical’s Broadway and West End success made stage-struck primary schoolgirls belting out “Tomorrow” at window-cracking force one of the many pitfalls of growing up in the late Seventies. Annie’s 2014 producers do, though, benefit from the 1980 film version being one of the most hugely expensive flops of its day, and a critically reviled nadir for its great director John Huston. “Huston merely reveals why he had never before in his long career been asked to make a musical,” Time Out intoned, while finding little evidence of its $60m budget in the stagey results. Its Depression-set but really Dickensian story of a pluckily self-sufficient, cruelly treated orphan melting the heart of Albert Finney’s blustering plutocrat “Daddy” Warbucks has gained popularity on the more forgiving small screen, and can be moving if you’re in the mood. But there is plainly room for improvement.

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The new plot which has been announced, with Jamie Foxx as a “hard-nosed tycoon and New York mayoral candidate” adopting Annie as a campaign move with the aid of “brilliant VP” Rose Byrne, doesn’t inspire confidence. If the film-makers had mined the long-running Little Orphan Annie comic-strip on which the Broadway musical was based, far more intriguing permutations suggest themselves.

Created by Harold Gray in 1924, the strip’s weirdly blank-eyed heroine already looks like a zombie parody. Gray’s virulently right-wing reaction to the Depression, when the strip was the most popular in America, saw Annie and the aptly-named “Daddy” Warbucks (who became fabulously rich pumping out munitions in the First World War) battling the New Deal, which Gray found so offensive that he had Warbucks drop dead in reaction to Roosevelt’s 1944 re-election. Given the wild social inequality of our own times, exacerbated by a global recession caused by Warbucks’s banking cousins, a Tea Party-loopy Gray homage or subversively left-leaning version of Annie’s tale could make it resonate with entertaining depth.

Musically, changes could be rung with equal ambition. The only 1977 song apart from “Tomorrow” to really be remembered now is “It’s the Hard-Knock Life”. Charles Strouse and Martin Charnin’s bouncily optimistic, bittersweet original is certainly fine. But it is Jay-Z’s memorable sampling of it as the basis of one his biggest hits, 1998’s “Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem)”, which has maintained its currency. Jay-Z’s Roc Nation corporation is partly behind the new Annie, and, as his use of one of the old one’s songs suggests, his own rags-to-riches, self-empowered tale is very much in its style.

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Many rap stars, in fact, fit Gray’s über-Republican myth of Annie as the ultimate American success story, not bemoaning her misfortune or, like wimpy English Oliver, asking for more, but dragging herself from the ghetto with can-do attitude. Hopeful as it is to see Beck’s name on the new Annie soundtrack, another Sia collaborator might have done so much more with this tale. Eminem’s mix of working-class pathos, clear-eyed intelligence about a USA he’s lived at the top and bottom of, and sentimental soppiness for his own daughter Hailie are made for Annie. With his verbally brilliant offensiveness reined in, Eminem the children’s musical entertainer, contributing to a story he has a genuine affinity for, is an irresistible prospect. “The Real Orphan Annie” is an opportunity missed.

There are precedents, too, for such musical re-imaginings. The Gershwins’ 1935 “folk opera” Porgy and Bess, set in the South Carolina black community of Catfish Row, was controversial from the start for what black American artists including Duke Ellington saw as its racially demeaning milieu. A 1959 film version with Sidney Poitier is forgotten now. Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald’s scat-heavy, richly emotional 1957 jazz LP version is much better.

Miles Davis’s 1958 Porgy and Bess LP simply dispenses with Ira Gershwin and DuBose Heyward’s lyrics and narrative, and any potential for Uncle Tom mugging. Davis’s soul-deep soloing to Gil Evans’s great orchestral arrangements discovers the essence of George Gershwin’s tunes. The spectacular success of Wicked, meanwhile, has managed to escaped the shadow of The Wizard of Oz. Then there are the much-loved, non-musical classics that have suddenly had songs foisted on them.

The Cary Grant/Katherine Hepburn/James Stewart screwball comedy The Philadelphia Story (1940) was equalled by its slickly hip Bing Crosby/Grace Kelly/Frank Sinatra remake High Society (1956). The Rodgers and Hammerstein songs in the film of The King and I (1956) effectively buried the critically-preferred Anna and The King of Siam (1946). Disney’s Bosnian-genocide-channelling musical of The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996) was an unlikely, daring success. The RSC’s 1988 Broadway musical of Stephen King’s Carrie, though, was a flop.

The squeaky-clean look of the orphanage in the new Annie trailer makes the 1981 effort seem like social realism. Though Quvenzhané Wallis’s Annie now asks “What’s the hustle?” to a black billionaire, a radical reinvention looks very much off the cards. Still, like Annie, we can dream.

‘Annie: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack’ is released on 17 November; ‘Annie’ is released in cinemas on 26 December