Nine-year-old Marisa Morell's smile to Reid Shelton was dazzling. Rehearsing the smash Broadway musical "Annie" in Los Angeles prior to last night's opening of the five-week San Diego run at the Fox Theatre, Morell was playing Annie and Shelton, Daddy Warbucks.
          The scene was at Warbucks' luxurious Fifth Avenue home and poverty-bred Annie had turned on the high-voltage smile to entice Warbucks into taking her to a movie.
          "Don't give a big smile."
          Director Martin Charnin spoke quietly from his chair against the wall of the Schubert Theatre rehearsal hall and then went over to stoop beside the small, redheaded Morell.
          "Just stand by the chair and look at Mr. Warbucks," he told her. When he turns to look at you give him a little smile, hold it until he turns away and wait until he looks again before you give the same small smile."
          When the scene was repeated, Morell's solemn, steady gaze was that of a waif who lived on hope and her tentative smile in an attempt to hide the intensity of her longing. She was trying for what she wanted and fortified for disappointment. The appeal was tremendous.
          "Annie is a survivor," Charnin said later in an interview. "She has had to take care of herself as long as she has been alive and if Daddy Warbucks hadn't come along, she would have gone on taking care of herself. She is tough and she will eventually tear your heart out with her toughness."
          Nobody knows the stage Annie better than Charnin. He conceived her and, inspired by Harold Gray's long-popular comic strip, "Little Orphan Annie," was the driving force in her creation.
          Charnin discovered Annie's potential as a musical comedy heroine in a book he bought in December 1971, containing ten years of Gray's comic strips.
          "I believe that every musical has to have a memorable heroine who is surrounded by interesting characters, gets into scrapes and overcomes," he said. "That was Annie, the eternal optimist who always sees the light at the end of the tunnel."
          Charnin presented his idea to the two friends who became his collaborators. Thomas Meehan wrote the book and Charles Strouse, the music. The lyrics are by Charnin. Peter Gennaro was to become the choreographer.
          "The first thing we decided was that this play was not going to be a comic strip, but a very real piece," Charnin said.
          The reality was established by setting the play in a time outside of the adventures drawn by Gray.
          "We didn't know anything about what happened to Annie or Oliver Warbucks before the comic strip," Charnin said. "Where did they come from? How did they meet? Gray had given only hints, so we invented the lives the characters had lived before the comic strip began and set the play in the two weeks before Christmas 1933.
          ""It was in the depths of the great Depression and FDR (President Franklin D. Roosevelt) was at the beginning of his long administration, an interesting time. Nobody had written a musical about the Depression since I don't know when."
          Selecting the setting was an easy decision. Establishing the characters' origins was a much longer process. More than a year went into the writing of the play.
          "The structure of a musical comes from a lot of sitting around and playing a game called, 'What If,'" Charnin said. "What if she wasn't an orphan? What if she was found on a doorstep? What if she wasn't found on a doorstep? What if, what if all the way down the line.
          "Finally a truth rises like oil to the top of water and keeps hanging around. You go to sleep with it and wake up with it and find it is still valid. You keep it."
          So in the play Annie is not an orphan, Oliver Warbucks is. Annie is a foundling and the search for her parents is a major element in the musical's plot. Charnin apparently continues to think of her as an orphan, however.
          "This is really a musical about two orphans who meet and fall in love and how they survive," he said. "That doesn't mean it is sentimental. We avoid sentiment like the plague. Our audiences don't cry because a dauntless little waif says, 'Look at my terrible circumstances, please feel sorry for me.' They cry because they follow Annie, become emotionally involved and end up willing victims."
          Audiences also fall victim to the show's exaggerations.
          "Oliver Warbucks is not only rich, he is the richest man in the world," Charnin said. "He doesn't have just any Leonardo da Vinci in his art collection, he owns the Mona Lisa.
          "When he needs help in the search for Annie's parents he calls J. Edgar Hoover and 40 of the FBI's best are made available to him. President Roosevelt also comes to his aid. 'Annie' works because of its excesses."

          It was more than three years before Charnin knew how well the show was going to work. Only about half of the reviewers who covered the 1976 premiere at a summer theatre in East Haddam, Conn., liked it. After a great deal of work, the musical opened for an out-of-town run on March 1, 1977, at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.
          "When the 2,200 people in the Eisenhower Theatre stood up at the end of the opening night show, I took it as a hint we were on the right track."
          The track led to a triumphant New York opening on April 21, 1977, and a number of that year's theatre honors, including the Tony and Drama Critic Circle's Best Musical of the Year awards. Charnin received one of "Annie's" seven Tonys for his lyrics and two Drama Desk awards for lyrics and direction.
          The acclaim received on Broadway is being echoed for the London production and three touring companies in this country. Charnin has cast and directed all of them. One of his latest moves was to bring Reid Shelton, the original Daddy Warbucks, from New York to replace Keene Curtis before the San Diego opening.
          Curtis is one of 14 leaving the 26-member cast in Los Angeles. He has joined the cast of a promising television pilot, a stage production hazard on the West Coast where performers receive more television and motion picture opportunities than they do in New York, Charnin explained. Most of the replacements nationally have been children, a built-in problem which Charnin is endeavoring to diminish.
          "I am now casting younger children," he said. "Little girls of 12 or 13 are at an age of great emotional chaos. They want to be young to stay in the play and older to go out with boys. It is a tough time in their lives. By casting 9- and 10-year-olds, they are able to stay with the show at least a year longer." Charnin has found the "Annie" children, the lead and six other "waifs," talented, uncomplicated and joys to work with.
          "A child actor doesn't own the same intellectual equipment that an adult actor owns," he said. "You have to reach them in a much more rudimentary way, put things in a frame of reference they can understand."
          One of Charnin's greatest challenges was to give the young actors a feeling for the drabness and misery experienced by children of the remote Depression era, the parentless children who toiled for food and shelter, slept in their clothes and shoes to survive the New York winter weather.
          "Kid actors can absorb what you say because they are uncomplicated," he said. "They only think about the performance. They don't worry about how the rent is going to be paid or if the telephone has been installed or if the plumbing leaks. They only think about what they are going to do when they get on the stage."
          His directorial approach with the children and adults has been the same in all five companies. Blocking of all five shows has followed the same basic plan. Yet, each production has a character of its own.
          "You take the musical that has been created and then deal with the actors' problems, interpretations, neuroses, shortcomings and strong points," Charnin said. "All of the things that went into making the first show have been ingested in the second, third, fourth and fifth, but they are not the same.
          "The companies are like your children. They all bear your name, they all look like you and when you see them, you can say, 'That's mine.' Yet, each has its own character and discipline."
          He considers "Annie" a very satisfactory child.
          "No show has had the demand that 'Annie' has had," he said. "Those who come to see the show go away with a sense of optimism, a sense of hope and joy and love. I think that is why it is a success, not because of any nostalgia for the old comic strip."
          Charnin sees the success as a long-lasting one.
          "I am a person who believes that children should take care of their parents in their old age," he said. "I think I'm going to be able to count on 'Annie.'"