Starlight to Stage ‘Annie Warbucks’ in October

SAN DIEGO —  “Annie Warbucks,” a new musical with Broadway ambitions, will inaugurate Starlight Musical Theatre’s first winter season, pending final contract negotiations.

The show, based on the adventures of Little Orphan Annie after Daddy Warbucks tries to adopt her, will play at the San Diego Civic Theatre for two weeks beginning Oct. 14.

Also, a new Broadway-bound musical, “Stardust,” is under consideration as a bonus show for Starlight’s summer subscribers.

“Annie Warbucks” will break ground not just for Starlight, which has expressed ambitions to present a new musical for some time, but also for the National Alliance of Musical Theatre Producers, which forged the first agreement among the five companies to present the work.

Starlight’s executive director, Bud Franks, who was named president of the National Alliance in April, said Tuesday that this move fits in with a larger plan by the National Alliance to promote the production of new works.

Musical theaters have long talked about the need to develop shows. Broadway is producing fewer new musicals and the rights to both old and new musicals are increasingly snapped up for national tours. Most of the immensely popular Andrew Lloyd Webber repertoire isn’t made available for regional productions at all.

Starlight’s four co-presenting companies, in San Bernardino, Houston, Seattle and Los Angeles, will present the show in their cities as part of a West Coast premiere tour that will allow the show’s creators to continue the work on its possible way toward Broadway. The theaters will not play a role in any ultimate Broadway production.

In the original “Annie,” a little orphan looked for her parents during the Depression. She doesn’t find them, but does find happiness when she wins the heart of rich Daddy Warbucks.

In the sequel, the court insists that she must have a mother for her adoption by Daddy Warbucks to be legal, so she looks for a wife for her guardian.

Starlight’s co-artistic directors, Don and Bonnie Ward, saw a reading of the show in New York a year ago, Bonnie Ward said Tuesday. It was a disaster when it was originally presented as “Annie 2” in an out-of-town tryout in 1989. But after a rewrite and restaging at the Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam, Conn., (where the original 1977 “Annie” was launched), things started looking up for the perennially optimistic orphan.

It reopened as “Annie Warbucks” at Marriott’s Lincolnshire Theatre in Chicago in February. It has since closed there and is scheduled to reopen at Chicago’s Drury Lane Theatre.

The “Stardust” show is a Broadway-bound package due to open at the Wilshire Theatre in Beverly Hills on May 14, with Don Ward serving as a production consultant.

The Los Angeles show, which is focused on the lyrics of 94-year-old Mitchell Parish, stars Hinton Battle, Toni Tenille and Sean Young (in her stage debut) as part of a 10- to 12-member cast singing the songs Parish wrote with various composers, including Duke Ellington and Glenn Miller.

“Stardust” was conceived by Albert Harris as an Off Off Broadway salute to Parish in 1986. But the show evolved as an Off Broadway show that has played the Kennedy Center in Washington and San Francisco’s Marines Memorial Theatre before being redesigned with Broadway in mind.

Don Shirley contributed to this article.