Andrea McArdle is new to TikTok, and Broadway’s original Annie is not easing in quietly. In a video shared this week, McArdle offered what she called a “scandalous, juicy little tidbit” from her Rainbow days: the singing audiences hear in the 1978 NBC television movie, where she played a young Judy Garland, is not a finished performance at all. It is her rehearsal reference track.
Here is how it happened, in her telling. Three days after she closed as Annie in London, her Annie-red hair was dyed back to her natural brown to play Garland, and she was run into a studio to sing through the entire catalog of songs in the movie, standards like “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows,” “Stormy Weather,” “I’ll Get By” and “Puttin’ on the Ritz.” She sang them once or twice, and the session was recorded as a reference vocal, a guide track the production could work from. McArdle expected to go back into the studio and record a real performance. Instead, she was told the movie, shot in about 12 days, could not spare the time.
“So it kills me every time I hear it because I know it was my rehearsal track,” she said, adding that her acting “matched the lack of intensity in it” because she was aggravated, and that “even though I was 14, the disrespect was shameful.”
Watch McArdle tell the story in her own words in her TikTok video.
Rainbow aired on NBC on November 6, 1978. Directed by Jackie Cooper and written by John McGreevey from Christopher Finch’s book Rainbow: The Stormy Life of Judy Garland, it follows Garland from vaudeville through her rise at MGM and the making of The Wizard of Oz, with Don Murray and Piper Laurie as her parents, Michael Parks as Roger Edens, Rue McClanahan as Ida Koverman and Martin Balsam as Louis B. Mayer. McArdle had originated Annie on Broadway in 1977, earning a Tony Award nomination, then played the role in London in 1978 before stepping straight into Garland’s shoes. Some critics at the time found her performance restrained, a judgment her story reframes nearly five decades later: what they heard, and what she acted to, was a guide track she never got to replace.
The finished result is the film’s closing scene, below: McArdle in the studio as Garland, recording “Over the Rainbow” for The Wizard of Oz, a performance built on that rehearsal track.
She signed off by promising a follow-up video about working with Cooper, whom she called “the worst director in all of Hollywood to me,” while laughing that he was also her only director. McArdle is posting as @andrea.mcardle, and if this first story is any indication, theater fans are going to want to follow along.