There was no curtain.

Instead, as families settled into their seats — booster seats everywhere and a deafening buzz of excited children around us — the orphans were already settling down for the night on stage.

I loved this opening.

The dormitory was sparse and regimented, beds lined up beneath suspended jigsaw pieces, a huge green door dominating the space and a bright red radio immediately drawing the eye.

We were getting settled. They were getting settled. And that little radio transported us straight into 1930s New York.

What followed was two and a half hours of proper, old-fashioned musical theatre - big numbers, a fabulous ensemble, wonderful sets and costumes, comedy, heart and some seriously talented children.

At the centre of it all, of course, is Annie played on Tuesday night by talented Sophia Saravanan. She and all the children could really sing and project their voices astonishingly..

Confident, kind, smart and fiercely protective of the younger girls, particularly Molly, she was streetwise without ever seeming hardened by the life she had been dealt.

There was a lovely empathy about her, but don’t mistake that kindness for weakness - don’t mess with Annie!

She also had another slightly unpredictable cast member to contend with: Sandy a loveable hound.

Watching Annie quietly administer doggy treats while simultaneously acting, singing and keeping her four-legged co-star on track was brilliant.

Sandy occasionally appeared to know there was something extremely interesting waiting in the wings, but Annie handled the whole thing with remarkable confidence.

The orphans as a group were superb. It’s the Hard-Knock Life had brilliant vocals, huge energy and sass by the bucketload, with Nick Winston’s choreography giving the number real punch.

And a special mention must go to Freya Beer as Molly, an absolute little scene-stealer. An enormous nose-blow produced one of the first big laughs of the evening and she continued to delight from there.

That strength extended right through the ensemble.  You don’t always see a company of this scale in modern touring productions, and it makes such a difference here.

When everyone fills the stage, the big numbers have real gravitas. It feels like a proper Broadway musical.

The same can be said for the music. Nick Tudor and his orchestra may be modest in number, but there was absolutely nothing modest about the sound.  

From where we were sat we couldn’t see them, but listening to the sheer scale coming from the pit, I would have sworn there were considerably more musicians down there. They matched the size and energy of the company beautifully.

Visually, this production is an absolute treat.

Colin Richmond’s set and costume design does so much of the storytelling. Hooverville is a fabulous jumble of makeshift shelters, strung lights, battered furniture and people dressed in the remnants of lives that had clearly once been very different. Suits and hats remain, but they’re now ragged — a simple reminder of how quickly fortunes had changed during the Great Depression.

Then we enter Warbucks’ world.

A huge Art Deco doorway, beautiful clothes, immaculate servants, expensive surroundings — the contrast couldn’t be greater. Annie suddenly finds herself dropped into unimaginable wealth and yet walks into this completely alien world with characteristic confidence.

The costumes are gorgeous throughout and the 1930s never feels like an afterthought. Richmond uses clothes almost as shorthand for where people sit in this world: success and wealth on one side, unemployment and dishevelment on the other.

Ben Cracknell’s lighting is equally clever. Those suspended jigsaw pieces change colour with the mood, glowing red when danger begins to close in, while one of my favourite comic images of the evening was Miss Hannigan screaming from behind an illuminated door.

And what a Miss Hannigan.

Claire Sweeney commands the stage as the unkempt, drunken, cruel and gloriously bitter woman in charge of the orphanage. She is very funny — her flirting alone tells you plenty about Hannigan — but what I particularly liked was that Sweeney doesn’t make her simply nasty.

She’s broken.

There is a desperation and need to be loved underneath it all that almost makes you wonder whether, given a different life, Miss Hannigan might have been a completely different woman.

Almost.

Then there are Rooster and Lily, played by Christian Cooper and Amber Kennedy. We hated them.

Which means they were doing their jobs extremely well.

The three together make a wonderfully horrible trio, and the production uses that suspended jigsaw again, now glowing red, as their scheming takes a darker turn.

At the opposite end of the spectrum is Tanisha-Mae Brown’s Grace Farrell, who was probably my favourite adult character of the night.

Gorgeous, smart and completely in control, she is somewhere between Mary Poppins and Miss Moneypenny — warm without being gushy, elegant without being aloof.

She understands Warbucks and his world, but she also understands Annie. Almost immediately she buys her a coat from Bergdorf’s and begins helping this little girl feel that she belongs.

Alex Bourne’s Daddy Warbucks initially feels almost Scrooge-like: business first, emotionally buttoned-up and seemingly more comfortable running an empire than dealing with a child.

I expected him to put up more of a fight!

But Annie starts working her magic remarkably quickly. Even his language changes almost immediately in her presence.

What develops between them becomes the emotional heart of the evening. Annie uses that mixture of charm, intelligence and vulnerability to get underneath the armour of a man who seems to have spent his entire life operating like a machine. As he gets older, perhaps he’s beginning to realise there might be more to life than business — and Annie becomes the conduit for that change.

But she doesn’t only change Warbucks.

She changes his whole household.

At first, we see staff largely through their functions.

But Annie learns their names, talks to them and sees them as people  — and Warbucks begins to follow her lead. By the time we reach the adoption celebrations, those servants feel much more like friends and family.

That made the prospect of losing Annie surprisingly moving. It wasn’t only Warbucks who had fallen in love with her. She had brought an entire household together.

The production also gives the grown-ups plenty to enjoy.

The Broadway sequence is a welcome change of pace and Elliot David Parkes’ Bert Healy brings bags of personality to the wonderfully cheesy 1930s radio world. Those sequences also cleverly keep things moving while larger scene changes happen almost unnoticed.