Addison Gray Stars as Annie in Worth County School Play

Addison Gray starred as Annie, the beloved orphan, in a production of Annie Jr. Friday through Sunday at the Worth County School.

The play started out at an orphanage somewhere in New York City where Molly (Kaydence Downing), Kate (Kinley Fletchall), Tessie (Krista Monticue), Pepper (Emsley Spainhower), July (Unique Brown), Duffy (Lexi Snead), and Annie were living under the supervision of Miss Hannigan (Areanna Galanakis), an overbearing headmistress, who did nothing but make the orphans work all day. Annie is the glue who keeps all the other girls grounded, but one night, it gets to be too much for her and she runs away.

On the streets of New York City, she befriends a dog who has also run away, but she is captured and brought back to the orphanage. But she gets the break of a lifetime when Grace Ferrell (Evalyn Gilland), secretary to Oliver Warbucks (Jarrett Gilland), one of the richest people in the world, brings Annie home to stay at his house for two weeks.

There is one complication — Mr. Warbucks wanted a boy instead of a girl, which somehow got lost in translation. But Mr. Warbucks relents and decides to adopt Annie.

But there is a question of whether Annie’s parents are still alive. Many years before, Annie’s mother put a message in a locket promising to come for her someday. So Mr. Warbucks decides to take matters to the highest platform in the land, even if it means working with Franklin Roosevelt (Heather Deardorff). who trounced the Republicans in the last election; Mr. Warbucks is a diehard Republican.

A master of pulling the strings, Mr. Warbucks gets himself and Annie booked on one of the most powerful radio shows in the country, hosted by Bert Healy (Hayden Sanders). With the new technology of radio getting beamed into new homes everywhere, and with the girls back in the orphanage listening, Mr. Warbucks offers a reward of $50,000 for information leading to the location of Annie’s parents.

Wildly jealous of Annie’s newfound fame, Miss Hannigan hatches a plot with Rooster (Unique Brown) and Lily (Laura Hansen) to create a fake story, claim the $50,000, and kidnap Annie. They come to Mr. Warbucks with forged papers purporting to show that they are the real parents of Annie and that they will take her to a farm in New Jersey. But in the meantime, President Roosevelt enlists the FBI to investigate what happened to Annie’s parents, and it turned out they had passed away many years ago. Miss Hannigan, Rooster, and Lily are arrested on charges of Attempted Kidnapping, Forgery, and Attempted Stealing.