As far as risks go, the holiday show at Actors' Playhouse is the exact opposite of playing the lottery. Cute kids and a dog? Check. Big voices? Check. Terrific songs? Check. Warm 'n' fuzzy Christmas tie-in? Check. The show is Annie, the Fort Knox of happy family musicals, a 1977 Tony Award winner that guarantees a good time to anyone who invests in a ticket (unless, of course, you agree with W.C. Fields, who said, ``Anyone who hates children and animals can't be all bad.''). Musicals don't endure for 2,377 performances on Broadway without being immensely appealing. And Annie, set during the Depression and based on Harold Gray's popular Little Orphan Annie comic strip, has ''heartwarming'' embedded in every line.

Annie, played by Karina Fernandez, puts on a good face for 'Grace Farrell' played by Colleen Tueth and 'Daddy Warbucks' played by John Herrera. Patrick Farrell/herald Staff

Actors' Playhouse has proven, via its own heavyweight performance at the Carbonell Awards every year, that you can trust it too, especially when it comes to staging the big musicals. Artistic director David Arisco, choreographer Barbara Flaten and the design team (Mary Lynne Izzo, who created nearly 100 costumes for the show; M.P. Amico, who created cartoonishly inspired sets; Ginny Adams, who has lighted it all beautifully) know how to tackle such large-scale challenges. And if Arisco's casting is right, the production, well, just sings.

The Actors' Annie cast is right, quite right.

It features some of South Florida's best musical theater talent -- Margot Moreland as a curvy, deliciously over-the-top Miss Hannigan; Terrell Hardcastle as her song-and-dance con-man brother, Rooster; Irene Adjan as Rooster's ditsy tootsie Lily; Terry M. Cain as a jovial Franklin Delano Roosevelt; Christopher A. Kent as pompous radio personality Bert Healey -- and it has a couple of out-of-town stars in Tony nominee John Herrera as Oliver Warbucks and Colleen Tueth as his pretty right-hand woman, Grace.

Obviously, no Annie works without a winsome, big-voiced Annie, and here Arisco delivers again. Karina Fernández, a seventh grader in the magnet arts program at South Miami Middle School, has the voice to belt the big numbers like Maybe and that anthem to optimism, Tomorrow. A slender 12-year-old with a radiant face, she moves and acts very well. She belongs on that stage with her far more experienced adult co-stars.

The girls playing her fellow ''orphans'' alternate in two casts of six each. The opening-night bunch -- Stephanie Diggles, Christina Jones, Sarah Boynton, Davina Leone, Stephanie Hodos and Karina Padura -- are just as sassily adorable as Miss Hannigan's tormentors should be, belting out It's the Hard-Knock Life as they ''scrub'' the orphanage floor.

And Fernández should watch her back: In a few years, when she's too tall and mature to play Annie, little diva-in-training Padura (she plays Molly, the tiniest orphan) will be just right for the title role.

As Warbucks, the busy billionaire who learns to live again thanks to Annie, Herrera is most touching when he acknowledges his character's changes by singing the tender Something Was Missing. Tueth is an attractive, appealing Grace, though you never really get that little quickening of attraction between her and ''Daddy'' Warbucks.

But the biggest guilty pleasure treat of Annie is watching the three ''scoundrels'' at work. Moreland is a deliciously boozy, blowsy Miss Hannigan, oozing comic hatred as she belts Little Girls. She, Hardcastle and Adjan do a knockout job on Easy Street, their lustful ode to greed. They are wondrously bad, and in a musical with so much sweetness, that's a good thing.

Fuente: The Miami Herald
Diciembre - 2003