ABSTRACT
Charnin became a director because “the lyricist was the lowest man on the totem pole, and had the least power, and did the most work for
the least amount of money. In the putting together of a show the director is the person who says, ‘No, I’ll put that song there.’ ‘No, let’s move this actor here.’ And those are the things that I thought I had
the equipment and the character and the strength to do.” In the midst of the concept-musical era of the ’70s (Michael Bennett’s A Chorus Line-the pinnacle of the era-had opened less than two years earlier), Charnin and his collaborators, Charles Strouse and Thomas Meehan, appeared on the scene with a “mind-bogglingly old-fashioned musical” called Annie. “I thought that Harold Gray [creator of the comic strip
upon which the musical is based] was an American Dickens. We were
coming out of a very, very angry, cynical, spiritless time. It was Vietnam, it was Nixon, it was drugs, it was awful. And Annie was the perfect manifestation of all of the promise and hope and spunk and optimism
that I and my collaborators wanted not only for ourselves, [but for] our children, our country, our world.” Charnin’s belief that the little orphan girl could serve as a symbol of hope in a country struggling to
redefine itself proved correct. Charnin’s philosophy is shaped by a single thought: “The one thing
that a director cannot do in the musical theatre is one thing.” This whole and encompassing approach dictates that “you’ve got to know about all of it. You cannot be uninformed. Knowledge is power. You’ve got to be aware of all the diverse elements; in a musical there are
five times as many as in a straight play. In order to really pay that kind of attention, you can’t just be single-minded and focused only on what’s going up on the stage. You have to be conscious of what
every department does, and what every department’s idiosyncratic problem may be, so that you can prioritize; more often than not, in the crunch when you’re doing a show, what you end up discovering
is that everyone will have a problem and your job is to say, ‘No, the costume designer’s problem is, at this particular moment, more important than the orchestration.’ So it’s a question of having this kind of
mini-quartermastering computer in your head. I think the reason wars are won is, yes, in terms of the strength of the army, but [also because] some guy makes sure that the food, and the tanks, and the
guns, and the bedding, and the gasoline all get to the place where the battle is going to be fought at the same time. And so that has been an invaluable part of the process for me-knowing when to say,
‘Now,’ or when to say, ‘Later,’ or when to say, ‘Never.’” Though he does not specifically cite Jerome Robbins as being influential
to his work as a director, Charnin points to West Side Story as having
had a tremendous impact upon him. “That performance experience
both helped and hurt. It helped to the extent that it showed me how a musical could have done so much of its homework beforehand that relatively few changes occurred in the eight weeks we were out of
town. Jerry [Robbins] was simply engaged in detail work. No songs were cut, no songs were added. No arrangements were changed, with the possible exception of some dance stuff. No one was fired; the
same company that went out came back in. Arthur [Laurents, book writer] would tinker with a line, or we would search for a way to make a crossover funnier. West Side is an example of a musical that was not in trouble. It didn’t help me to the extent that it was (to my knowledge) the only musical in forty years that that ever happened to. Every show since, and probably before, has gone through a series of changes. You
get rid of an actor, you change a song, a scene doesn’t work, a costume is thrown out…. None of that happened in West Side. So, if that’s the height of the bar at which you first experience the race, and if that’s
the standard by which you ultimately pursue a career, you’re in deep, deep shit, because that’s just never going to happen again.”
