Congratulations to Elgin and the Elgin Opera House. You did it. Mill town turned drama town; old stories overwhelmed by new ones; Elgin a center point tying La Grande and the Grand Ronde Valley to the Wallowa Valley — and maybe to Baker County.

I didn’t count the cast number in the opera house’s production of “Annie,” but there were dozens, and everyone did their bit with skill and flair. The song “Tomorrow” even got me thinking about friends who are tied up still in the recent election and worried about tomorrow.

1971, the year the musical “Annie” was written, was the year of Charles Manson and a continuing Vietnam War. Six years later, when the play opened on Broadway, there was a national pause from all that grief. There were high hopes for Jimmy Carter, a Southerner who came from peanut farmers and became a nuclear warrior. He helped develop the nuclear sub program — a stealthy way to keep the peace. Carter pardoned Vietnam draft “evaders,” and we got “Star Wars” and disco in 1977.

The play was based on a comic strip, “Little Orphan Annie,” that ran from 1924 to the near-present. Google says it was critical of “organized labor, the New Deal and communism.” The Elgin set had 1933 in the backdrop, and the play was friendlier to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the needs of Depression-era children, but still praised ingenuity, hard work and honesty.

So, I guess you can take a play like “Annie” and turn it to today’s problems, use small sleights of dialog to give the appropriate message. And the place where it is played and the way it is cast can help tie together a community that is weighed down with political signs still on fence posts, families and neighbors distrustful of each other and those signs on the posts.

I don’t know the politics of the actors in that cast, but have worked with one of the leads, Kellee Sheehy, directly at the Josephy Center for Arts and Culture in Joseph and in cooperation with her at her new job at the Nez Perce Homeland Project in Wallowa. I knew her interest in drama, but not her talent. Her son was on stage as well, as was Cece Curry, who I’ve watched grow from a toddler, now tall and lithe, full-voiced belting out choruses. They are all from Wallowa County, which has meant a lot of travel and long hours in rehearsal.

Daddy Warbucks was played and sung by Kenn Wheeler, a drama prof at Eastern Oregon University, and the nefarious Miss Hannigan by Kyle Kayle, a theater lover who is involved with the STEM program at the college. Annie was Becca Austin, who is apparently from La Grande and has been at song and dance since she was 4. She was terrific.

I’m not going to name everyone, and have already said it is a large cast. I’ll say again they all know their lines and carry the right notes and dance the right steps. The task of pulling this together is mind-boggling: recruiting, auditioning and selecting a cast; coaching song, dance and lines; blocking the movements of the big cast, incorporating set changes in the moves; building and managing those sets, etc.

It occurs to me that in the arts, or in athletics, business and other things as well, those of us in small towns and cities across the land have huge pools of talent. And the measure between an actor who plays Daddy Warbucks here and one who goes on the road with a Broadway company is not so great. In another time or world, some of our doctors would be surgeons at Mount Sinai, our singers on the road with Willie Nelson, our artists showing at the Lawrence Gallery in Portland, our athletes on the track in Eugene.

Jeff Oveson, an elite college hurdler in his day, whose daughter ran in college and probably in Eugene, told me the number of fine college athletes is huge, and the differences among the best often come down to work and will.

Maybe our Elgin Annie will keep climbing the ladder, maybe she’ll make it to Broadway, or to some equity company in Seattle or Los Angeles. Or, maybe she’ll love theater here for the next 50 years, like some of the folks who performed with her right here in Elgin, in rural Northeastern Oregon.

And that too will be a rich life and a gift to the rest of us.

So, here’s to all who put it together and to the performance. Here’s thanks for taking us away from daily troubles and perceived troubles, for giving us a chuckle over politics rather than a heartburn, for connecting us to art that is as old as a Greek chorus and as contemporary as Broadway in New York.