So Jen and I went to see the Annie: The Broadway Musical last night. Having never seen the movie, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Of course, it was Kid’s Night at the Orpheum, and the little boy sitting next to us was almost as entertaining as the show itself.
The actress playing Annie did a great job and the show had some fun little laughs. But perhaps the funniest part of the show was when Annie goes to the White House with her soon-to-be adoptive father, financial heavyweight Oliver Warbucks, and inspires FDR to conceive of the New Deal. Everyone in the Oval Office is all doom and gloom until Annie comes in, sings “Tomorrow” on Roosevelt’s desk, and awakens the innovative juices of the President’s Men.
FDR’s Brain Trust decides to create a bunch of government jobs filling potholes and building dams in order to get people off of welfare and back to work, so that they can “start paying taxes again” (an actual line in the play). Why it’s a good idea to have the government pay people so that people can turn around and pay the government right back is never addressed, nor do they say where the money will come from in the first place. But boy, was the little red-head cute!
In any event, Annie saves the day, is adopted by Daddy Warbucks, the titan of big business, who then joins forces with FDR’s big government to sing the show’s finale, “A New Deal For Christmas,” complete with a list of government programs that will “fill every stocking with laughter,” just as soon as the government waves the printing wand and the magic money appears. I think it would make a great Obama campaign ad.
I kid you not. I mean the show has Republican business leaders getting in bed with a Democratic government in the middle of an economic crisis in the vain hope that massive borrowing and spending will deliver the Hooverville-ites (actual characters in the play) from their slum under the bridge. Reads just like today’s newspaper.
All in all it was a great night with my wonderful wife, and just goes to prove a point that I make every chance I get: you can’t make lousy economics better simply by getting a cute kid to sing about it.
