Broadway standout, lyricist for Annie

NEW YORK -- Martin Charnin, who made his Broadway debut playing a Jet in the original West Side Story and went on to become a Broadway director and a lyricist who won a Tony Award for the score of the hit Annie, has died. He was 84.

Charnin died Saturday at a White Plains, N.Y., hospital days after suffering a heart attack, said his daughter, Sasha Charnin Morrison.

"He's in a painless place, now. Probably looking for Cole Porter and Ira Gershwin," Morrison wrote Sunday on Instagram.

Charnin was a keeper of the Annie flame, protective of what he created with songwriter Charles Strouse and book writer Thomas Meehan. The 1977 original won the Tony as best musical and ran for 2,300 performances, inspiring tours and revivals.

Charnin attributed the success of Annie in part to its sweet optimism and its message that things were going to get better. After all, it was written during a period of instability, he told The Associated Press in 2015.

"We were living in a really tough time. Right in the middle of Nixon. Right in the middle of Vietnam. There was an almost-recession. There was a lot of unrest in the country, and you can always feel it, and a lot of depression -- emotional depression, financial depression. We wanted to be the tap on the shoulder that said to everyone, 'It'll be better.'"

Born in New York, Charnin initially set off on a career in the fine arts. He was an arts major at The Cooper Union when a friend invited him one summer to an adult camp in the Adirondacks to wait on tables and act as an extra.

"I got bit," he would say later.

Charnin gave up a fellowship to go to Rome to paint, instead favoring the life of a struggling actor. One day, he read that director Jerome Robbins "was looking for authentic juvenile delinquents" in an open call.

He went along among 2,000 wannabes, which became 200, then 20 and finally two. "I was one of the two," he said. That's how he made his Broadway debut as a Jet in West Side Story in 1957.

In 1963, he supplied the lyrics to the show Hot Spot, with music by Mary Rodgers. He also wrote lyrics for La Strada, a musical based on a Federico Fellini film, but it closed after opening night.

Charnin had better luck with Two by Two, in 1970, which had music by Richard Rodgers, who also directed. Charnin then became director of Nash at Nine, a short-lived revue based on Ogden Nash poems. He was nominated for several Emmys for directing variety shows for NBC, winning for 'S Wonderful, 'S Marvelous, 'S Gershwin.

Metro on 07/08/2019

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