Katie Finneran Will Be Miss Hannigan in 'Annie' Revival Little girls of "Annie," beware: Broadway's new Miss Hannigan knows a thing or two about stealing scenes, no matter how cute the moppets are. Katie Finneran, the two-time Tony Award winner - most recently for playing a barfly in the 2010 revival of "Promises, Promises" - will play the alcoholic orphanage manager in the revival of the musical "Annie" that begins performances in October. Ms. Finneran confirmed the news in a telephone interview on Friday, after weeks when news outlets and theater blogs were floating her name and many others (Rosie O'Donnell, Jean Smart, even Elaine Stritch) in a fevered chase to name the actress playing one of the juiciest roles of the 2012-13 Broadway season. For the original 1977 production Dorothy Loudon won the Tony for best actress as Miss Hannigan, who torments Annie and her fellow orphans and then tries to scam the wealthy Daddy Warbucks as he tries to adopt the little redhead. At the Tonys Ms. Loudon beat out fellow nominee Andrea McArdle, who played Annie. Nell Carter played the role in the critically derided 1997 revival on Broadway. When the new revival of "Annie" was first announced in 2010, Ms. Finneran said, she dreamed of playing Miss Hannigan but quickly put aside that hope, since she assumed the producers would cast a movie star who might guarantee ticket sales. Several stars and other actresses were indeed auditioned, and it was not until this spring that Ms. Finneran was contacted about the role. She was, in fact, nearly seven months pregnant when she met with the director James Lapine and others; they were not expecting her to sing, she said, but she went in prepared and performed her version of "Little Girls," Miss Hannigan's famous rant about orphans. "I wanted to make sure that my version of Hannigan was what they were looking for," Ms. Finneran said. While Miss Hannigan is often played as a past-her-prime, hopelessly embittered broad, Ms. Finneran - who is 41 - said she saw the character as "an aging flapper, a woman who had hoped to be a great burlesque dancer, someone who never leaves the house without her makeup on because she might meet the fruit cart man and fall in love." Ms. Finneran, who grew up in Miami, said she has never seen a stage production of "Annie" but has loved the musical ever since receiving a Broadway cast recording of the show for her 8th birthday. "My two favorite musicals growing up in were "Annie" and "Sweeney Todd," and my best friend and I would sing all the songs when I was a kid," she recalled. I played Miss Hannigan, I played Annie, I played orphans. I got to know that album like the back of my hand. She described Miss Hannigan as a close cousin to the liquored-up, love-starved Marge MacDougall in "Promises, Promises," who - as portrayed by Miss Finneran - brought down the house in the show's Act II opener opposite Sean Hayes in the 2010 production. But Ms. Finneran said her performance in "Annie" would not simply be a re-do of Marge, noting differences between the characters. "Hannigan is a really mean woman, whereas Marge didn't have a mean bone in her body," Ms. Finneran said. There's nothing cute about Hannigan, and the audience needs to see and feel her cruelty, to make the stakes of the show higher. "Now, I'm not going to go Scorsese on the actresses playing the little girls," she added, "but Hannigan needs to be very frightening." Ms. Finneran said she is preparing to give birth any day (her due date is June 22); she already has a 15-month-old son with her husband, the actor Darren Goldstein ("Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson"). Aside from her Tony for featured performance in a musical as Marge, she also won a Tony for feature actress in a play as the sexy, clueless ingénue Brooke Ashton in the 2001 revival of "Noises Off." The producers had previously announced that 11-year-old actress Lilla Crawford ("Billy Elliot") will star in the title role of "Annie." The casting for Daddy Warbucks and other roles will be announced later. The show is scheduled to begin preview performances at the Palace Theater on Oct. 3 and open on Nov. 8. a