The Three Penny Orphan:
Now with more Mariachi Kidnappers!
A Mash Up of Little Orphan Annie and Mack the Knife for Erin Oberdorfer.
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Who really is Little Orphan Annie? Where did she come from? What brought her to her desperate state of orphanism?
These are the questions haunting the cast of the new smash hit
THREE PENNY ORPHAN!
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A big-time eleven-year-older in the Eleven-Year-Old scene takes a tumble into the dark side of New York when she meets the handsome Macheath, (Mack the Knife), on loan from Newgate Prison in London.
He’s as attracted to her family’s vast wealth as she is attracted to his brooding eyes, pouting lips, and chiseled strength.
In the opening scene, our little red-headed heroine, Annie Mayfax, belts out the following ditty from the marble atrium of her parent’s Manhattan palace:
Oh golly gee I don’t want to be an Orphan!
Oh no sirree I can’t happily say...yeeeeeesssss!
To a life without mom and dad and happiness!
The crowd applauds as she tries to bow, but her big eleven-year-old bobble head sends her off kilter and she nearly tips over. But if she were to fall over, she would land in a big pile of caviar, because her family is so rich.
What could go wrong for this eleven-year-old up-and-comer who laughed at destitution? Who scorned the working class? And spurned the affections of the less wealthy, the less polite, the less-than-eleven?
Macheath, that’s who.
Yes, Macheath, better known to the musically inclined and the fey as Mack the Knife.
Macheath has eluded capture from cops and thugs alike during his brief stay in the big city of New York. He has hidden himself in the nearest mansion on Park Avenue he could find. After singing the I Walk a Crooked Path song, he is forced to disguise himself as a piñata during a big eleven-year-old birthday to-do.
(For the less culturally inclined: a piñata is a candy-filled effigy of a harmless animal or a political opponent, traditionally cracked open by terrifying bands of children wielding sticks.)
What is the first line Macheath utters when he falls to the floor of the Mayfax mansion after being pummeled mercilessly by Annie and her uber-rich, uber-good-looking eleven-year-old friends?
New York doesn’t seem that different from the Old York, if you ask me!
The future orphan and her stick-wielding four-year-old friends interrogate the lank, candy-coated stranger who has invaded the luxurious Mayfax mansion.
Who are you?
What are you doing here?
Are you mean, like a hairy ruffian?
Could you be
An awful cemeterian?
Bad! Bad! Bad!
...and they renew their assault on Macheath with sticks, punctuating the rhythm of each bad in the song with a blow of broom handles right on his piñata.
“No es bueno,” Macheath whispers before lapsing into unconsciousness, but not before witnessing a group of sinister south-of-the-border banditos kidnapping Annie and the other children and snapping the children’s sticks like matches to the rhythm of the Stick ‘em Up song done in Mexican mariachi style.
“Stick ‘em up! Stick ‘em up! Stick ‘em up!
Or you die!
Get in this sack! Get in this sack! Get in this sack!
Or we’ll cry!
Ai,yai, yaieeeee!”
The audience barely has time to recover from the onslaught of trumpets and miniature pom-poms that seem to accurse mariachi players like adolescent acne. The last sack is closed, the last child is caught, the curtain drops.
Macheath drags himself toward the audience, barely able to lift the stage curtain. His lower half is hidden in the folds of the thick fabric as he sings to the front row! To the back corners! To the people still waiting at the concessions stand for a thimbleful of box wine!
He stretches his voice like the pelt of a wildcat strung on a tanner’s frame. This audience is his only remaining world.
Why? he intones dramatically, and the moment his head drops, the house lights come up.
The Mariachi Kidnappers appear at all the exits and wings. They have new sacks.
Empty sacks.
Six theatre-goers are hauled away in those sacks. You wouldn’t have noticed them until the spotlight lit them up: a man who looked confused; and then a woman who looked confused; and then several other confused-looking people.
At first, the audience members having sacks shoved over their heads are polite to the actors playing the kidnappers, with nervous titters, and mild hand gestures indicating “thanks but no thanks” even as they’re being dragged away. (The show debuted in Minnesota, after all.)
The Mariachi Kidnappers assure the audience members that the sacks over their heads and the application of slight pressure on their necks, applied from the grip of their expertly trained arms, are just part of the show, and won’t they follow the others into the lobby?
These six people who are pulled from the audience are never heard from again and very little effort has been made to find them.
The curtain rises once more.
Our little heroine, red-haired Annie Mayfax is being forced to double-check piles of discarded beer-stained scratch-off lottery tickets and pull tabs from local bars and houses of ill repute. She is enslaved by the State Lottery Commission who is funding a new state office building and a state rainy day fund with the proceeds.
Annie finds a winning ticket some idiot had thrown away. She sings to us That’s the Ticket (My Lucky Ticket) until you swear she’s going to get a nosebleed. She plans to turn in the winning ticket and buy a “plane ride, bus ride, or boat ride” home to her wealthy family and privileged lifestyle.
Just then, as the piercing strains of her contralto has rattled your brainpan sufficiently, Macheath appears at the Lottery Commission’s child labor den. Clearly old Mack has some nefarious enterprise scooting across his neural receptors. Up to no good, that naughty rake.
But he gets distracted by Annie’s winning lottery ticket.
Now, Annie may only be eleven, but she’s not blind: Macheath is a stone-cold hottie. She instantly falls in love with him, and he instantly promises to betroth the hell out of her.
The play doesn’t address the severe discrepancy in age between Macheath and Annie. With her bouncy spirited attitude, Annie can fill in a 1040 IRS form as easily as skip a rope. The situation is presented so fluidly in the production: little Annie Mayfax is making choices as a full-grown woman, but she keeps that buoyant optimism that eleven-year-olds are known for.
And their prolific singing.
Macheath sweeps her off to Paris and then to Athens. (Texas and Georgia, respectively.) He drives a delivery truck for a guy called the Godfather of Payola. He expresses the value of holding your tongue in song “or someone will hold it for you”.
Annie and Macheath have a wonderful, romantic time of it (for about three blocks) when Macheath nearly sideswipes a black limousine carrying none other than “the Godfather of Payola” - whose real god-given name is Daddy Warbucks.
Now Annie may be only eleven, but she can do the math. Sure, Macheath may be good-looking now, but what will he look like when she is twelve? And thirteen? He’d be ancient by then! But Daddy Warbucks would still be rich, just like her former family, whose address and name she can’t recall because the Mariachi Kidnappers spun her around blindfolded at the piñata party.
She convinces Daddy Warbucks to execute Macheath and administer the justice owed to him, but he refuses. Daddy Warbucks dumps little Annie while he pursues maritime maneuvers in the narrow channels of the vivacious Lydia Clairol, wealthy and glamorous daughter of a ship-building tycoon.
Annie and Macheath kill Lydia and reconstruct her body in a bottle and send her out to sea like a message. They decide to destroy Daddy Warbucks and his empire, and they trick him into attending a piñata party, where Annie spins him around and around until he cannot remember his name or where he lives.
Annie assumes legal guardianship of Daddy Warbucks because a court rules him incompetent in song. Macheath moves into the Warbucks mansion where some very unsavory scenes of debauchery transpire. Annie sings about chairs for no apparent reason. Annie and Macheath hide their illicit arrangement under a thin tissue of human decency while squeezing the Warbucks fortune dry. They have to spin the old man once every day or else he’ll start to remember.
Enter Miss Hannigan, arch-conniver. The dastardly trio hatch a scheme to trick Warbucks into revealing his military weapons contracts so they can sell them to the Germans. They sing a song called Split Three Ways, shake hands as they form a spinning triangle, and then freeze as the lights cut on stage and the house lights come up.
The Mariachi Kidnappers appear in the aisles and at the exits, collecting another six audience members in sacks. The man next to you is taken. He urges you to find his wife and tell her what happened.
You never suspected he was part of the show.
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