Broadway Fame
Loudon's performance as evil orphanage administrator Miss Hannigan in Annie won her the Tony Award for Best Leading Actress in a Musical and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Featured Actress in a Musical in 1977. In the show she introduced the seminal showtunes "Little Girls" and "Easy Street." Of her portrayal, Clive Barnes wrote, "As the wicked Miss Hannigan, Dorothy Loudon, eyes bulging with envy, face sagging with hatred, is deliciously and deliriously horrid. She never puts a sneer, a leer, or even a scream in the wrong place, and her singing has just the right brassy bounce to it." Loudon later revisited the character of Miss Hannigan in the ill-fated 1990 sequel, Annie 2: Miss Hannigan's Revenge, which closed quickly after a dismal pre-Broadway engagement in Washington DC.
In 1979, Michael Bennett cast Loudon as Bea Asher, a widow who becomes romantically involved with a mail carrier she meets at the local dance hall, in Ballroom. She was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Leading Actress in a Musical and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actress in a Musical. She performed the number "Fifty Percent" from the musical during that year's Tony Awards ceremony. During her rendition of George Gershwin's "Vodka" at the 1983 Tony Awards ceremony, she ad-libbed, "I'm too good for this room...I'm too good for this song!" At the 38th Annual Tony Awards ceremony in 1984, Loudon performed "Broadway Baby" from Follies. In The New York Times, John O'Connor said of her performance, "Miss Loudon has developed the art of mugging into something of a hyperactive disease."
In 1980, Loudon replaced Angela Lansbury as Mrs. Lovett in Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd. In reviewing her performance for the Christian Science Monitor, David Sterritt said, "Her body sways like a reed in the emotional storms of her own scatter-brained creation, and her off-hand manner becomes still more off-handed when the most explosive matters are at stake... Miss Loudon gives a comic characterization in the most classical tradition." The following year she co-starred with Katharine Hepburn and Julia Barr in the play The West Side Waltz. In 1982 she won the Sarah Siddons Award for her work in Chicago theatre. She appeared in the 1983 Jerry Herman revue Jerry's Girls; that same year she played the role of the miserable middle-aged actress Dotty Otley on Broadway in Michael Frayn's farce Noises Off, a huge hit.
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“To anybody who can hold the Present at its worth without being inappreciative of the Past, it may be forgiven, if to such an one the solitary old hulk at Portsmouth, Nelson’s Victory, seems to float there, not alone as the decaying monument of a fame incorruptible, but also as a poetic approach, softened by its picturesqueness, to the Monitors and yet mightier hulls of the European ironclads.”
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