The Album Thing: Original Broadway Cast, Annie

The album challenge. It’s a Facebook fad that’s going around. It was supposed to be ten albums, but who are we kidding. I have lots more than ten albums to be happy about!

This is my nod to Broadway, to junior high when I learned to appreciate the glories of the American musical theater, and to Tricia Edwards, wherever she may be today. She turned a bunch of midwestern middle school monsters into Annie aficionados, Broadway buffs, Camelot connoisseurs.

Also, something that really instilled this as a favorite musical, is that my little high school self was lucky enough to be tapped to play the first trumpet part in our high school musical my senior year, and guess which musical it was. Indeed, our high school’s performance of Annie in 1984 happened to be the first amateur performance of that musical in our state, and I got to play the first notes of the musical as a solo. “The sun’ll come out tomorrow . . .”

Seriously. The overture starts with a trumpet solo.

A few more words about Tricia Edwards, the vocal teacher at Oakland Junior High when I was there. She made waves with her ambitious school musicals for such young students. She had junior high kids doing Broadway shows (including Once Upon a Mattress and Bye, Bye Birdie). She said it was actually easy: you just need to treat the kids as if they were able to do the jobs, show them how to do it, and they rose to the challenge. . . . Fact is, another ingredient is that we all adored her.

Her class in the American Musical Theater put us light years ahead of where we might have been; it gave us an overview and history of an important part of American performing arts culture. One of her personal friends had been an original cast understudy on Broadway for the role of Grace Farrell (Daddy Warbucks’ assistant). Mrs. Edwards made something very, very remote from our little Missouri lives seem somehow within close reach. (If you watched Glee, she was basically Mr. Schue, only thirty years before Glee; Matthew Morrison was just an infant.) I wish I could write her a letter to tell her thanks. Mrs. Edwards, if you’re still out there, I hope you find this post.