ONLY A DAY AWAY.(The Talk of the Town)

Maybe far away, or maybe real nearby, there are girls who still love "Annie." On a Sunday morning earlier this year, twenty-four such girls assembled at a rehearsal studio in Chelsea to audition for the thirtieth-anniversary tour of the show, which opens this week at Madison Square Garden. Before they belted a single note of "Tomorrow," the girls--between the ages of six and thirteen, several wearing clothes on which the word "dance" was sewn in sequins--took off their shoes, formed a line, and waited to be measured. The height limit was four feet ten inches.

"I want a teeny one. I've got to have a teeny one," said Martin Charnin, who was sitting in a room across the hall. Charnin, who is seventy-two years old, wrote the lyrics to "Annie" and has directed nineteen productions, from the original Broadway show in 1977 to the current tour. Though Charnin has presided over hundreds of "Annie" auditions, he seemed taken aback when a casting director brought in the first group of six girls, pointed at one, and whispered, "She had an emergency appendectomy the other night."

"What doctor do you go to, Dr. Feelgood?" Charnin asked the girl, Nikki Testa, who was nine, and had been appendix-free for less than seventy-two hours. "Is the mother here?" he asked.

Nikki's mother, her husband, and Nikki had flown in from Las Vegas--Delta had given Nikki a full row on the plane. The mother assured Charnin that the danger had passed. "There's nothing in there," she explained.

The twenty-four hopefuls had been winnowed down from more than six hundred. In 1978, Charnin recalled, "we had twenty-two hundred kids at the Alvin Theatre--police on horseback showed up." The atmosphere was more subdued in Chelsea: out in the orphan "holding room," one girl read a library book about a princess, another played with an electronic organizer, and a third leaned toward her mother for a strengthening spritz of hair spray. The fixative was applied in vain; Charnin wanted the girls to look tough and messy. He instructed them to remove all hair accessories--headbands, scrunchies, barrettes--and deposit them in a pile.

Periodically, Charnin drew a purple comb through his own long, silver hair. He was wearing faded jeans, a matching denim ...