Hootin’ ‘Annie’

Marissa O’Donnell remembers exactly what happened when she won the title role in the national tour of “Annie.” Actually, the 12-year-old actress remembers only part of what happened.

“I was jumping up and down and I actually fainted after that,” said Marissa.

Fainted? As in, out cold?

Yep. The next thing she knew, she was lying on the couch, with her mom hovering over her.

She later pieced together what happened.

“I was sitting doing my homework and my mom got the phone call,” said Marissa, a sixth-grader at the time in Westchester, N.Y.

“I couldn’t even believe I had won. There were so many girls at the audition, there were 563 girls. I was just overwhelmed.”

So she jumped up and down so vigorously that she passed out and woke up on the couch.

“And then, once I got through that, I was up and jumping again,” said Marissa.

That “Little Miss Sunshine” moment was just the beginning of a wish come true for this young actress. Since then, she has spent just about every night living out a nearly universal little-girl dream: playing the plucky orphan kid in the national tour of “Annie,” which arrives in Spokane tonight.

Marissa has spent the last 11 months savoring the experience – even when the eight-show-a-week grind begins to feel just slightly like a hard knock life.

“On tour, sometimes it’s very tiring and you have to tell yourself, ‘I want to be here, this is what my dream is,’ and then you kind of muddle through it and it all works out,” she said.

The routine includes schoolwork as well as stage work. Marissa and three of the other “orphans” go to school every day with a traveling tutor.

“We do a show, go to bed, and wake up the next morning for school,” she said. “It’s awesome, because you’re in a classroom in a really small environment, sitting with your friends and you get to be taught more and learn more of what you’re studying.”

And she absolutely loves being able to go onstage and “show people what I can do.”

“My favorite number is ‘Tomorrow,’ when I get to work with the dog, Sandy,” said Marissa. “Or ‘I Don’t Need Anything But You,’ when I get to work with John Schuck. That’s a lot of fun because that’s basically my dance number and I get to show my dance skills in that.”

John Schuck is actually Conrad John Schuck, who plays Daddy Warbucks. His face will be familiar to many people from his dozens of movie and TV roles (“McMillan and Wife,” “Roots,” “The Curse of the Jade Scorpion”). He might also be familiar to local theatergoers because he played Daddy Warbucks in a previous “Annie” tour that hit Spokane in 1999.

Alene Robertson, a veteran of the Broadway version of “Annie,” plays Miss Hannigan.

A lot of kids know “Annie” mainly from the 1982 film, but Marissa warned people not to expect the stage version to be exactly the same.

“We don’t have the bridge scene, where she is climbing up the bridge, because we can’t have stunt doubles,” she said. “Everything’s live. We don’t have the ‘Dumb Dog’ song, unfortunately. And Annie doesn’t have curly hair right from the beginning. My hair is short, in a bob, and later on you get a surprise.”

Annie’s hair is, of course, red. Marissa’s is light brown.

“They dye it,” she said.

Her mom travels with her most of the time. But on those occasions when her mom has to go back to New York, people from the cast take care of her. She always has an adult with her, because “those are the rules.”

Her touring “family” also includes a couple of canine friends.

“We actually have two dogs: Lola, who plays Sandy all the time, and Mikey, who’s actually our understudy,” said Marissa. “He’s not ready to go on for Sandy yet, but in a couple of more months he might be.

“And if Lola ever got really injured or really sick, Mikey would have to go on and push through it.”

This tour will end in March, and Marissa has given some thought to what she wants to do afterwards.

“I really hope to get into TV and films and try something different like that,” she said.

But what, exactly, will she do in March?

“I’ll go back to middle school.”