No official word on whether or not Jay-Z's classic "Hard Knock Life" will make the soundtrack to the new version of Annie he's going in on with Will and Willow Smith. But if his recording history is a precedent, the team's next movie will be a remake of Oliver! starring Willow's brother Jaden. And it will be pretty much exactly the same as Annie.

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At some point, someone will pipe up and announce that she, too, has starred in a musical production. She's put on a wig and stage makeup and a battery-pack microphone and neglected her science homework for weeks on end to learn a dance routine. She has won the hearts of parents and teachers alike with her charm, her clear-as-a-bell high notes, her ability to emote for the seats in the back.

And then, Little Orphan Annie gets laughed at.

Annies are a sisterhood united in red wigs, misbehaving dogs and a devastating lack of respect from cooler, more adult stage characters. Some of this, to be sure, is because "Annie" happens largely in elementary schools, years away from the stolen cigarettes and kisses that make up so many high school musical theater memories. Annie, you see, is literally child's play, by and for a group of people not old enough to see "Cabaret" without a parent or legal guardian-and for that Annies are punished.

You know what? We're sick of it.

"Annie" is a musical that doesn't quite fit into any established category. It's not a comedy, no one dies, and the center of the story isn't unrequited love but poverty, both of wealth and affection. In addition to these grim qualities, it is terrifying.

Annie and her friends, as you may remember, live in an orphanage, and yes, they sing songs and dance up and down the stairs, but the songs are about hard labor and the dances are elaborately choreographed escapes from Miss Hannigan, the drunk warden who abuses the kids and does a very peculiar and highly sexualized song and dance routine with her brother.

Annie longs to reunite with her birth parents, but unlike the wealthy orphans of The Little Prince or The Secret Garden, cared for by elderly grandmothers and their butlers, Annie is stuck in a tenement house in the New York City of the 1930s, which communicates to everyone but her that her parents are dead, destitute or both.

Also, everyone Annie meets-besides Daddy Warbucks, Miss Farrell and FDR-is a hobo!

It's dark stuff, and yet! Reviews good and bad always seem to judge the show based on its appeal to families and children. A 1996 production starring Kathie Lee Gifford as Miss Hannigan (and here you thought no orphanage head was more likely to eat her charges than Carol Burnett in the 1983 film version) was praised by the New York Times as "an elating piece of family theater that deserves to become the mass-entertainment holiday staple it aspires to be." A year later, though, a new Broadway cast was called charmless and antithetical to the show's "perky, crowd-pleasing roots."

It is apparently impossible that a show starring children, some of whom, yes, are indefatigably optimistic, can also be scary and real and a reflection of how precarious life for the Other Half is in times of economic hardship and national malaise.

There's also the problem of "Tomorrow," the song most associated with the show and the Pollyanna qualities that have shunted it into the "musicals for children" category. Yes, it can grate, and yes, there isn't a whole lot of subtext (okay, there is no subtext) happening, but it's also really powerful! An abandoned child who, until recently, had never gone to bed without hunger pangs is singing, on the radio, for the sole purpose of brightening the nights of people who are jobless, who are poor, who are hopeless-people who are, in fact, no different from the same people that were forced by the same circumstances to put her in the orphanage in the first place. It is not sexy, and it is not mournful, but it is pure-not an expression of feeling from singer to audience, but a chance for audience to express feelings of their own.

When it was announced that "Annie" would be returning to Broadway in 2012, something shifted. I have yet to read anything mocking the show's reappearance, and perhaps more encouraging, critics and fans alike seem to realize how exceptional the timing is. The Great Depression feels closer now than it did in 1996. We as theatergoers might be ready to see the show not as a glorified pageant for children, but as something closely resembling our own realities, if enhanced by tap dancing. And, in what is a true vindication for Annies everywhere, the original Annie, Andrea McArdle, is taking over the role of Miss Hannigan, inspiring a slew of "day after 'Tomorrow'" headline puns–and not one joke about red wigs.

Angela Serratore is a writer/historian in Los Angeles, and has played Annie-twice!

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All of which is to say: damn, girl. You might just be the story of my eye for this whole frighteningly exhilarating decade.

So when BAM told us that Huppert would star in their staging of the Heiner Müller play Quartett-itself fitfully derived from the 18th-century French novel Les Liaisons dangereuses-I was basically guaranteed to go. And look, I'm already mad at life because director Robert Wilson's sole New York staging of the Philip Glass opera Einstein On the Beach happened before I was born-so the fact that he would be directing Huppert amounted to a ridiculous buttercream icing on top.

Still, I was afraid that I'd see Quartett and love it for the evanescent fumes of its participants' past successes, even if the production itself blew. But it didn't. It really didn't. You can fault Wilson for having stock moves: deep reds and blues on the lighting tip, "surprise" non-diegetic sounds amplified at ear-splitting volume, or his ritualized, glacially-paced blocking. But then there's also the if-it-ain't-broke argument: these theatrical gestures are all still powerful in performance, just like David Lynch's grab-bag of tricks retains the power to spook after all these years. (Yes, it's a dark room, and yes, it sounds like the electricity is going out. Hide under your seat anyway.)

Müller's text (I was previously unfamiliar, BTW), is constructed from jaw-droppingly heavy bricks of Eros-writing, which Wilson-in minimalist fashion-has Huppert split up and repeat in these hypnotic, cellular breakdowns. It's like looking at the same photograph in a series of bracketed exposures. Each time she runs her tongue over the line, it brightens or darkens.

Even if you find Wilson's approach familiar, his tics at least put Huppert's artful voice front and center. The effect is akin to watching an artisan construction worker blast a brilliant, perfect cube into thousands of also-brilliant smaller creations, and employing a jackhammer to perform all that division. It doesn't even matter if you're not familiar with the Dangerous Liaisons original. (All you need to know is that these former lovers are torturing each other, in old age, with their respective tales of past conquests.) It's straight fire like this (in French, with English subs projected above the stage):

MERTEUIL: Did you find the way back into your own hide, Valmont. There is no man whose member won't stiffen at the thought of his dear flesh departing, fear makes philosophers. Welcome to sin and forget the poor box before piety overpowers you and you forget your one true vocation. What else have you learned but to maneuver your cock into a cunt resembling the one you once fell out of, always with the same more or less pleasant result, and always deluded that the applause of those alien mucous membranes is meant for you, and only you, that those screams of lust are addressed to you, while you are nothing but a barren vehicle, indifferent and totally interchangeable, for the lust of the woman who is using you, the power drunk fool of her creation. You know well enough that every man is one man too few for a woman. You also know, Valmont: soon enough fate will catch up with you and you won't even be that anymore, a man too few. Even the gravedigger will enjoy himself with us.



VALMONT: I am bored with the bestiality of our conversation. Every word rips a gash, every smile bares a fang. We should let tigers play our parts. Another bite, please, another strike of the paw. The stage craft of wild beasts.

A pair of dancers stand in for the pair during these conversations-slipping one another into nooses, leather straps and whatnot-all behind a scrim. A fifth character, an old man, is added to this quartet with no explanation. He performs a funky dance in between set changes that I could've done without, but no matter: his interludes at least gave (a lot of) people the opportunity to bail on the performance without interrupting any of the talky parts.

Anyway, this thing plays one more time, on Saturday. It's pretty sold out, but some people were getting in on standby Thursday night, from what I could see. And if you can't make it, well, it's still worth checking out Müller via Amazon or from your local library.

But here's yet another consolation prize (of sorts): a leak of one of the hotter songs from Don't Stop, the long-delayed second album from the Norwegian bubblegum-indie blogstar Annie, which comes out next Tuesday. My Love Is Better plows some of the same ground as Quartett, oddly enough.

The dance-all-night guitar hook was played by the dude from Franz Ferdinand-making perhaps a better argument for Franz Ferdinand's existence than I ever expected was possible. More importantly, the lyric is a come-hither-cum-get-your-ass-away-from-me switchblade: "I'll let you go down if you go away / I need to know you're happy to play / I'll let you touch me every now and then / And if you want some yeah I'll tell you when (when when)," Annie sings toward the end, before diving into her chorus for the last time:

My love is better (Than your love)
My heart is better (Than your heart)
My moves are better (Than your moves)
My shoes smell better
And I'm be-be-be-better
My kiss is wetter (Than your kiss)
My lips are better (Than your tricks)
You know you never (Had my hips)
I'm so much better (So eat this)

Including a "better heart" in the middle of any thorough itemization of advantages one has over an ex-lover carries a useful poetic undercurrent: how much better can that ruthless heart really be, after all? It's a hot contradiction. Could it be that-whether in pop music or in avant-garde theater-this taunting unavailability turns out to be perhaps slightly more than half the fun of coupling? Happy weekend, everyone. Go get some.

Previously: The Pleasure Principle

Seth Colter Walls is a culture reporter at Newsweek. Previously, he wrote about U.S. and Middle East politics for a variety of outlets.

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