McArdle Sets Sights on the Original Annie

‘I don’t think this will make people forget Annie,” said Andrea McArdle, comparing her role as teen-ager Margy Frake in “State Fair” to the spunky orphan who made McArdle a Broadway icon at the tender age of 13.

In fact, McArdle said, she has not yet committed to doing “State Fair” beyond six months on the national tour. She’s hoping to snag the role of Nancy in the British revival of “Oliver!” when it comes to the United States, which might conflict with “State Fair,” she said.

Still, McArdle said she gave up a career-stretching chance to play the tough Rizzo in “Grease” in order to be in “State Fair”--because, she explained, “this is the only chance in anyone’s lifetime to create a Rodgers & Hammerstein role.” (Actually, it’s not quite a “creation”: Margy was played in North Carolina and Long Beach in 1992 by Susan Egan, who’s now a theater star on her own, having “created” the role of Beauty in Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast,” which she’s still playing in Los Angeles.)

When McArdle was approached about playing Margy, she recalled, “I felt so unlike Margy. I didn’t think it would be believable that I could play 18 or 19 years old.”

At 31, McArdle is no longer a kid. She has a 7-year-old daughter, Alexis, who wants to audition for the next Broadway revival of “Annie.”

“I already put in a call” to the producers,” McArdle said. Alexis is still too young for the title role, her mother acknowledged. But when she suggested that her daughter might play one of the younger orphans, Alexis replied, “What do I want to play that baby for?”--which sounds similar to her own reaction to the idea of playing Margy.

“I tried to talk [the “State Fair” producers] into using me as Emily,” McArdle said, referring to the older entertainer, who is played by Donna McKechnie. She thought they wanted “a typical Rodgers & Hammerstein ingenue” for Margy--”a little more operatic, a little bland.” But they wanted McArdle.

At first she tried to play the ingenue to the hilt, she said. Egan, her predecessor in the role, is “the perfect ingenue, but that is so far from me.” Eventually, she said, “I decided to put myself in there. I just stopped doing an age thing and let myself be myself.” She’s so satisfied with the result, she said, that she’s now glad to be playing Margy instead of Emily.

Asked about this, book writer Tom Briggs said that Egan, too, played Margy with grit: “We introduce her on a day when she’s in a horrible mood--it’s not like she’s in an organza dress, sitting in the bedroom window.” Perhaps McArdle was thinking of the “very sweet” Margy that Jeanne Crain played in the 1945 movie, he said.

At any rate, though McArdle said she began as “the biggest skeptic” about “State Fair,” now “I’m blown away by the response it’s getting. They’ve pulled the songs from other shows so well. And with all the pyrotechnics [in contemporary musicals], it’s refreshing to see a show that doesn’t try to be anything it’s not, that’s sexy in the sense of what you don’t see.”

McArdle’s eventual dream role, however, is not Margy or even Nancy in “Oliver!” What she really wants is to play the other Annie on Broadway, as in “Annie Get Your Gun.” Having played that role in less prominent venues (including San Bernardino in 1982), McArdle is convinced that “it needs to be mine for this generation. I’m so dead right for it. I want to knock ‘em dead, to be so exhausted after the show that I can’t go out to eat.

“You can’t knock ‘em dead in [“State Fair”],” she added. “It’s not a tour de force, it’s teamwork. But maybe ‘State Fair’ will get people interested in me.”