Video recordings of original Broadway "Annie" performances...do they even exist?
March 14, 2012 2:46 PM   Subscribe

...because Google-fu is failing me thus far. I'm in the midst of a random nostalgia attack regarding the musical "Annie", and would love to find a video recording of either a late 1970s or early 1980s performance. I've already got the original Broadway audio soundtrack and I am not looking for the 1982 or 1999 movies.

So, I was addicted to the "Annie" soundtrack for a while as a preschooler, and recently I randomly picked up the original Broadway soundtrack version, which has in turn gotten me very interested in finding a *video* to watch of one of the earlier performances. Again, I do NOT mean the 1982 movie...that one is readily available on Netflix, etc.

I did some cursory searching last night and was rather disappointed to find only a scant few Youtube clips of bits and pieces of the play.

I realize the early performances (as in, those between 1977 and 1982) happened long before everyone and their dog had a video camera, but it seems kind of weird that NO ONE would have bothered filming the performance at least once, unless there's some funky Broadway taboo I don't know about that discourages such things.

Of course it should go without saying that I am not looking for bootlegs or anything like that, I was just sort of assuming some amount of officially-sanctioned filming must have occurred at some point of such a popular musical performance and was weirded out to not find any evidence of such a thing.

So my question is...am I just not searching the right places / using the right terms, or have these performances just truly been lost to time?
posted by aecorwin to Media & Arts (2 answers total) 3 users marked this as a favorite
 
The "Broadway's Lost Treasures" series has a clip of Andrea McArdle singing "Tomorrow", as well as the original orphans singing. (Including a tiny Danielle Brisbois doing a solo dance.)
posted by Melismata at 2:51 PM on March 14, 2012


Best answer: There's almost certainly a copy in the New York Public Library's "Theatre on Film & Tape Archive" (which I learned about from a previous AskMeFi). I don't know if there's a similar archive on your coast, but it wouldn't surprise me if something like this existed in LA or SF.
posted by bcwinters at 2:58 PM on March 14, 2012


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