The story centers on Marcella, a dying young girl whose toys come to life and take her on a magical adventure to meet the Doll Doctor, in hopes that he can mend her broken heart.

A giant hand sporting a thumb ring attempts to drag the boat down to Davy Jones' Locker, so the toys begin flapping the bed's blankets like wings and rise into the heavens ("Something in the Air"/"So Beautiful").

The Rat in the Rolls-Royce, representing the man her mother ran away with, jumps out to steal Mommy away, so Poppa punches him out, and the couple agree to remarry ("The Wedding").

The toys find themselves separated in the Grisley Woods National Park and frantically search for one another through a maze of trees littered with skeletons with glowing red eyes ("Gone").

Back in her bedroom, a now-healthy Marcella tells Poppa of her adventure, and he offers to sew a new heart on Raggedy Ann's chest ("Gingham and Yarn Reprise").

(as Teddy) After finding success with their 1969 Hallmark Hall of Fame production of The Littlest Angel, Broadway producers Richard Horner and Lester Osterman searched for another property that they could adapt into a live-action TV special.

At a 1974 Friar's Club roast, Lester and Osterman found themselves seated at a table next to Sesame Street composer Joe Raposo, who expressed interest in their idea.

[5] In 1981, Thackray dropped the music and reworked the film's script as a play titled Raggedy Ann & Andy, which remains available to license for regional/school productions in the US and Canada.

[6] Several years later, Raposo joined the board of The Empire State Institute for the Performing Arts, (ESIPA) where producing director Patricia Snyder, who had seen the movie on television,[7] urged him to adapt a stage musical for the character.

[11] Starring Ivy Austin as Ann and Mark Baker as Andy, the show followed the dolls as they ran away from home to join the circus,[12] but Raposo concluded "it simply didn't work".

[5] In 1984, Snyder, having retained the stage rights to the character after the closure of the previous play, asked playwright William Gibson for his opinion on the script and music, which largely unimpressed him.

In passing, she told the fabled story of Johnny Gruelle creating the Raggedy Ann character to entertain his sickly daughter, Marcella, who died at the age of 13.

Gibson's friend, Shakespearean actor Paul Haggard, was cast as General D.[17] The play opened at ESIPA on December 7, 1984[18] under the title Raggedy Ann.

[24] David Schramm replaced Haggard as General D., Gibby Brand took over the role of Poppa,[24] and two of the doctors were switched, but the rest of the principal cast was unchanged.

[27] By March 1985, tentative plans were made to bring the show to Moscow,[28] but this was not ensured until November, when U.S. and Soviet leaders signed a new cultural agreement at the Geneva Summit.

[29] At 5 a.m. on the morning of December 3, Snyder received a formal invitation via telephone,[30] the deal was finalized six days later,[31] and the cast began rehearsals in Moscow on January 2, 1986.

The language barrier occasionally led to difficulties—most notably, when the composer wanted to evoke the sound of a Mariachi band[37]—but musical director St. Louis was thoroughly awed by the orchestra's intensity.

[38] The show was not widely advertised in Moscow,[39] but word of mouth quickly spread,[40] the performances sold out,[41] and tickets were scalped for ten times their original cost.

[44] Ivy Austin also received a three-minute standing ovation after she crooned the title song in Russian during the first preview,[29] and all these pauses helped to bloat the running time to nearly three hours.

[47] Roger L. Stevens, founding chairman of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts had seen one of the ESIPA stagings and agreed to produce the show on Broadway but urged the creators to bring back the original title,[48] which had built-in brand awareness.

[53][54] Director Birch summarized the production in an interview published the day after its closing: "This is an unusual, even bizarre, piece for the Broadway theater, but it has been done by three people who really care—myself, Bill Gibson and Joe Raposo—and a score of actors, a lot of whom are overqualified for what we've asked them to do.

The Production Team consists of Alex Smith as Stage Manager, Finley McDonald as Assistant Stage Manager, Dylan Dahlberg as Lighting Designer, Bob Walters as Sound Designer, Noella Senra as Choreographer, Meg McCleary as Assistant Choreographer, and Michael Mylen and Hazel Hawlik as Music Directors.

[58] The Evening Sun's Lou Cedrone also remarked on the young audience's reaction, concluding: "Today's children, having listened to all those records and having seen all those horror movies, accept dark far more easily than adults".

[61] Beneath a headline declaring the show was a "child's garden of bad dreams", The North Jersey Record's Robert Feldberg said that Gibson "makes Macbeth look like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm".

[62] The New York Post's Howard Kissel titled his review "Throw It Back Into the Rag Bag" and summarized by stating: "Any little girl who prizes her own Raggedy Ann doll can probably tell better stories about it than this disjointed and distasteful musical".

[66] He declared that the play "is loaded with psychoanalytic subtext—sex, death, and even a holocaustal mass grave are always peeking through Marcella's nightmares—but the author apparently considers it beneath him to wrap his highfalutin message in a coherent, let alone exciting, story".

Rich went on to attack the "faceless pop songs" that made up Raposo's score, as well as Birch's direction and choreography, remarking that the Act I finale was "what Busby Berkeley might have done if he had only a half-dozen dancers and several celestial Hula-Hoops at his disposal".

[67] The Philadelphia Daily News critic, Nels Nelson, denounced other reviewers for their unfair and hostile vilification, praising the show for having an "intellectual equilibrium" and providing "more than a mere suggestion of the seamy underside of the universe".

[68] Howard Kissel of the New York Daily News was very critical of the show, but he lavished the cast with praises, remarking that "Lisa Rieffel is especially appealing as the little girl, and Elizabeth Austin makes the most of her trampy mother.

Touching on commonality in the reviews, he pointed out similarities to The Wizard of Oz and Peter Pan, remarking that "it was difficult to follow and never managed, as those musicals did, to come up with a coherent plot".