As I mentioned on Wednesday, the new Time-Life issue of Annie: The 30th Anniversary Production also offers a second disc. It’s mostly devoted to Annie 2: Miss Hannigan’s Revenge, the show with book by Thomas Meehan, music by Charles Strouse, and lyrics by Martin Charnin — the same team that gave us the 1977 Tony-winning classic that, for a while, became known as Annie 1.

For a very little while, really. After Annie 2 canceled its planned February, 1990 opening at the Marquis, closed in Washington — and broke the heart 11-year-old Danielle Findley (the new Annie) — Annie 1 reverted, now and forever, to Annie.

Many songs from Annie 2 wound up in the heavily revamped 1993 off-Broadway version, Annie Warbucks. None that did is included on this disc. But nine that didn’t make it in are here — including two absolute winners — in this “true saga of Annie 2 and its roller coaster ride.” Those words are spoken on the disc by Charnin, who’s one narrator; no less than Carol Burnett (the first movie’s Hannigan) is the other, explaining her role in this revenge comedy.

The show didn’t start with Hannigan, though — all to give Dorothy Loudon a late star entrance, my dears — but some time in “1934,” as the first song goes, at Oliver Warbucks’ Fifth Avenue Mansion. But the Depression being what it is, things are financially tough even here. “Rubber’s really on the skids” is one nifty Charnin lyric, though an even better one has Warbucks insisting that his staff “Learn to turn your paper over so you’ve written on both sides.” Charnin also gives a couple of cute in-jokes that refer back to the source material. The first one has Annie bravely accept this austerity measure by saying “One red dress is all that I’ll ever need” – which in fact was all she ever wore in the funnies. Similarly, Warbucks later says, “This is hard-boiled economics; this is not, my friends the comics.”

Annie and Warbucks have another problem when a representative for the “United Mother of America” arrives and says that Warbucks isn’t capable of raising a little girl alone, and that he must marry so that Annie will have a mother; otherwise, the organization will take her away from him. Warbucks reluctantly agrees, but Annie says she doesn’t want a mother in a “1934” reprise that, as orchestrated by Michael Starobin, regrettably sounds as if it’s a Nazi anthem. It should have been a tender song in which Annie fears someone new in her life, which had been going so well until this happened. Charnin instead offered a number of small things that irritate a kid — “Mommies make you eat things like squash” — instead of including what made Annie great: Genuine emotion.

The first song that will have you rushing to your “Repeat” button is “How Could I Ever Say No?” with that wonderful trademark “Strouse bounce” (heard in la “It’s the Hard-Knock Life,” “The Telephone Hour,” “It’s Superman,” and dozens of others). Hannigan re-unites with cellmate Lionel McCoy, and insists that he help her kidnap Annie and split the ransom. My favorite rhyme is her “Help me, Li’nel” to his “No, that’s final!” Of course, one could suspect that Charnin chose the name Lionel after he found the rhyme; after all, wasn’t that how, in Annie, he named Warbucks’ butler and housekeeper via “When you wake, ring for Drake” and “When you’re through, Mrs. Pugh.”?

Warbucks is too busy to court anyone, so finding the future Mrs. Warbucks falls onto his  ever-dependable secretary Grace Farrell. Soon she’s complaining in song that Warbucks is always saying, “Grace, take a memo! Find my reading glasses! Get me a wife,” which she follows with, “He doesn’t know I’m alive.” No, those commands prove he certainly does know that she’s alive. The lyric should have been “He only knows I’m alive when he needs something.”

Still, Grace does her job and starts interviewing potential candidates, asking them some rarefied questions to test their cultural mettle. Charnin gets in some good jokes about Edgar Allen Poe, Vincent van Gogh, Bela Bartok, Lillian Hellman, and Dostoevsky in a pleasant enough ditty, “The Lady of the House.” A creaky plot device had a disguised Hannigan come in and prey on Warbucks sympathy with a fabulous song, “But You Go On” (written during the Washington run, and retained for Annie Warbucks; it’s the working-class woman’s “I’m Still Here”). Nevertheless, Meehan gilded the lily by having Hannigan choose as her alias the very-see-thruable “Charlotte O’Hara.”

Burnett then says that Hannigan gets an unexpected break in the kidnapping plot because she “finds a kid who looks enough like Annie” so that she can switch one with the other. Actually, that kid, a street urchin named Kate, was a dead ringer for Annie, as is proved by the fact that Danielle Findley played her, too. Hannigan tells Kate, “You! You! You! can be Annie, too!” – a nice pun on the show’s title.

Alas, “You! You! You!” isn’t included here, perhaps because Strouse recycled some of the melody into Annie Warbucks’ “Above the Law.” (If we want to get technical, “You! You! You!” was a Strouse recycling job to begin with; the melody first appeared in “Love Comes First,” Margo Channing’s original 11 o’clocker when Applause tried out in Baltimore.)

Hannigan and Lionel tail Daddy Warbucks, even when he says that he wants to go to “Coney Island.” The idea does sound a little too “N.Y.C”-y, but the wonderful, ragtime-tinged melody excuses that. Fay Apple always mourned that, unlike anyone, she couldn’t whistle, but she’d learn just so she could keep this delicious Strouse melody in her mouth.

Charnin starts off with a bright lyric, too: “You never know what’ll happen to you in Coney Island,” but then his first example of that is a limp one: “A lady might lose her glove” – all to rhyme with the more convincing, “A fella might fall in love.” The other examples are fine enough, leading to the conclusion that “You’ll never come back the same.” That latter line was not lightly tossed off as a mere celebration of Coney Island, but offers a second layer of meaning: Annie isn’t going to come back the same, because the kidnappers will switch her with Kate, who’ll then return to the Warbucks mansion in her place. So in Washington, while the nine-minute number continued with some heavenly Peter Howard dance music, Hannigan and Lionel were seen trying to capture the kid.

They got Annie, too, through another smart move Meehan devised: Annie wants to go on a carnival ride, and while Grace says she’ll go with her, Annie needs to feel grown-up and says she’d like to go alone. Which of us didn’t feel the same way in our youth after years of riding with our parents? Grace lets her – which gives the ne’er-do-wells the chance to make the switch.

The next three songs may only interest those who only have an insatiable thirst for the makings of a Broadway musical. “All I’ve Got Is Me,” “I Guess Things Happen for the Best,” and “My Daddy” all deal with Annie’s feelings once she’s kidnapped — and all have the exact same melody. Charnin explains that “We were able to fix and make some changes though we know we were closing,” so he rewrote. Thus you get what Annie sang when the show debuted, the change mid-run, and the change before closing. What the trio of songs does best is show how Charnin was willing to work and wouldn’t give up. To come up with an entirely new idea and write a distinctly new lyric, all while having to fit the same Strouse melody, couldn’t have been easy — especially in the era when musical theater songs were expected to rhyme and scan correctly, too.

Charnin says on the disc that the third song allowed Annie to “get closer to Daddy Warbucks, which is what Annie 2 should have been about all along.” No, she was close enough to him, and none of us left Annie ever doubting that they both loved each other. Why go over those emotions again when they were so well-established?

What Annie 2 should have been was a story of a kid who wanted her new father to get married to Grace Farrell — not necessarily because she needed a mother, but because she felt that Grace really loved him, and she wanted to see them together. Annie would have had two struggles here: 1) To get this pretty young woman to admit she loves Warbucks — and she does because he’s blossomed into a real human being — and not worry that he’ll just think she’s out for his money, and 2) To get this hesitant, older man to admit his feelings and not fear he’ll be spurned because he’s older, fatter — and certainly balder. A few misadventures along the way prior to a happy ending would have made for a real audience pleaser. Annie 4, anyone?

You may e-mail Peter at pfilichia@aol.com

All right, I know you won’t believe me, but the album of the year is Annie: The 30th Anniversary Production on Time-Life Records.

I understand. You’re still not going to buy it. For one thing, you’ve been skeptical of an album that doesn’t even get its date right. Given that Annie opened on April 21, 1977, this should be labeled “the 31st anniversary recording” – and the folks at Time-Life should have had their launch party at Baskin-Robbins.

No, actually, this is the 30th anniversary production, as the CD booklet and spine proclaims. It just that Time-Life took longer than anticipated to release it. It’s quite worth the wait.

I know, I know. A truly sophisticated musical theater enthusiast feels he can’t like Annie. Too sentimental. Too commercial. Oh, let’s get down to brass tacks: Too successful. If Annie had closed in a weekend, we’d all be saying to our friends, “Listen, you’ve just got to hear this fabulous score on this bootleg tape.” But a show that finished in 1983 as the sixth-longest running musical in Broadway history isn’t one we can champion anymore; it doesn’t need us for that. Even many who went wild for it in that blackout-filled, heat-waved, Son-of-Sam 1977 soon fell out of love with it.

Musical theater aficionados aren’t the only ones who tired of Annie. Even in Annie 2: Miss Hannigan’s Revenge (more about that show later), when someone in the White House sang “Tomorrow,” President Roosevelt demanded a cease-and-desist. When the singer rebutted by saying “But I thought that was your favorite song,” Roosevelt unapologetically responded, “It was – but now I’m sick of it.”

Martin Charnin, who wrote the lyric for that song, and all the others in Annie --and conceived and directed the original production, too – was in the 1980’s writing a revue for Nancy Walker that was to be called Back on the Town. It never got on, but I still recall Charnin at a backers’ audition singing one of its songs, which included the lyric, “If you want to clear a room, just sing ‘Tomorrow.’”

I’m sure that tomorrow will mark for many the 30th anniversary of the last time they played the original cast album. Still, Annie’s been pretty hard to escape. Anyone who’s has a daughter, granddaughter, or niece in the last three decades has probably run into the show, whether it’s because he’s taken that girl to a Broadway, regional, stock, or amateur production – or because he’s had to attend a production in which the lass was on-stage.

But this 30th/31st anniversary album – even better than the original cast album (and certainly the soundtrack) -- demonstrates why Annie was such a strong show. As I said recently at a tribute to composer Charles Strouse at the Paley Center, Annie was really a miracle because we all went in expecting a comic strip spoof, and we weren’t prepared to become so emotionally involved with a little girl who would not be deterred from the mission of finding her parents. Bookwriter Thomas Meehan also found the perfect tone in telling of a previously aloof man who came alive because of her. That story is better told on this CD, simply because a CD can hold more than could LPs, cassettes and 8-tracks of the original. This one weighs in at 64.17 vs. 43.30 of the original.

I can hear you now: “Now you’ll never get me to buy it, because what I want out of life is less rather than more of Annie.” Go ahead, make all the wisecracks you can think of, and then give a listen. First comes a lush-sounding overture, courtesy of the Istropolis Philharmonic Orchestra of Bratislava, Slovakia, where many recordings are outsourced to save money. This brings no happiness to Local 802 – the musicians’ union – but such an album probably wouldn’t have been economically feasible without going overseas. Happily enough, at least six 802’ers -- including drummer Cubby O’Brien (a baby-boomer icon from his days on The Mickey Mouse Club) – got a paycheck for sweetening the sounds once the tracks has been delivered home. And the overture has been sweetened, partly because “Easy Street” is now part of the overture and because “Tomorrow” has been re-orchestrated to stress strings. (There’s a lush entr’acte, too.)

On “Maybe,” Marissa O’Donnell turns in the strongest performance as Annie that I’ve heard since Andrea McArdle. (And remember, when you’re a theater critic for a New Jersey newspaper, you see a lot of Annies.) This, though, would be as good a time as any to inform that there’s a good deal of dialogue on the recording, and this song offers the not-so-necessary litany of “Good night” from each orphan to Annie.

But the introductory dialogue on “It’s the Hard-Knock Life” is especially welcome. Here’s where Miss Hannigan demands of the orphans that “You’ll stay up till this dump shines like the top of the Chrysler Building” – which explains, unlike the cast album, why Molly says it later. And given that “It’s the Hard-Knock Life” is a melody with which most fall in love at first hear, it’s nice to have that reprise with additional lyrics, even if it’s only 41 seconds worth. “Tomorrow” includes the endearing scene where Lieutenant Ward challenges Annie to prove that Sandy belongs to her by calling him over. Again, this O’Donnell kid does a splendid job with the classic.

Conrad John Shuck, who’s played Oliver Warbucks for decades, is here to reprise his role. By now, you’d think he’d know enough to pronounce “you’re” as “yure” and not “yore,” so that it rhymes with “pure.” But he’s otherwise fine. That’s especially true on “N.Y.C.” which has a couple of extra minutes of dance music – and wonderful ones they are. (Monica L. Patton does lay it on too thick as the Star-to-Be, though.)

Alene Robertson, no stranger to Miss Hannigan via many productions, is sound of mind, body, and voice in “Little Girls” – where she gets to add a “Shut Upppp!” to quarreling orphans. She’s snarlingly funny on “Easy Street,” too, in a cut that includes all the dialogue outlining her plot with Rooster and Lily to murder Annie. (And they say Annie is an escapist, fairy tale musical. How many others suggest a little girl is going to have her throat slit?)

But the most important addition on the entire album, one to which I was looking forward the second I realized this would be an expanded disc, was in “You Won’t Be an Orphan for Long.” Finally, we hear how much Warbucks has come to love Annie, when he vows to put his feelings for her aside inn order to give her what she most wants: Her parents. Hence, Charnin’s most important and spot-on lyrics: “What a thing to occur; finding them, losing her.” They make us fall in love with him, too.

Onto Act Two, and “You’re Never Fully Dressed without a Smile.” Given that this song starts in the radio, we’re introduced to the full cast of the Oxydent Hour of Smiles, and get to hear singer Bert Healy via the perfectly-in-period voice of Christopher Vettel. What we also get is the sequence where Bert taps toes. Those who don’t know Annie – and who could that be? – wouldn’t from a CD get the joke that Bert isn’t tapping, but a sound-man with a pair of shoes is. But maybe there’s someone out there who’s going to be fooled just as much as the radio audience of 1934 was.

You may know “We’ve Got Annie” from the film version (if you lasted that long with it). Here it’s sung in counterpoint with the title song we’ve always known. During “A New Deal for Christmas,” there are a few extra measures, too – but more to the point, there's Annie’s exclaiming, “Sandy!” It may remind you that there’s no logical reason why that dog is brought in in a box; after all, Annie met Sandy and lost him long before she met Daddy Warbucks. We’ve never heard her mention Sandy to him, and yet there he is. And yet, does anybody care about logic at that heart-warming moment when Sandy pokes his head out of the big ribboned box?

But wait! I’m not through. After you’re finished listening to Annie, move on to Annie 2: Miss Hannigan’s Revenge -- the second disc of the set. Told you I’d bring it up again. And I will – on Friday.