Zoren: Another key reporter in Philly market, also a novelist, is leaving

The departures keep coming.

This time, it’s one of the best reporters in the market, Channel 6’s Annie McCormick, who leaves the station and possibly television, 13 years after arriving there from Harrisburg by way of Waco, Texas, and Albuquerque, N.M.

McCormick announced her decision on Facebook, where she thanked viewers and 6 ABC while saying she looked forward to her next chapter in journalism.

She also talks about continuing to “tell the public’s stories in a variety of media.”

That might mean continuing via nonfiction books that deal with true crime.

In 2020, McCormick published “The Doctor, The Hitman, and The Motorcycle Gang,” which dealt with the murder of an Atlantic City radio personality, April Kauffman, who was found shot to death in a Linwood, N.J., home in 2012, the same year McCormick started at Channel 6.

A 2013 conversation with Kauffman’s daughter, Kim Pack, led to a five-year investigation that involved Kauffman’s father-in-law, a doctor, and a motorcycle gang, the Pagans.

On Facebook, McCormick talks about her latest book, “Restless Ghosts,” which delves into the 1929 deaths of two Moorestown, N.J., socialites, Horace Roberts Jr. and Ruth Wilson, who are found dead, again by gunshot, in Wilson’s mansion.

A friend of Roberts and Wilson loudly suspected murder and was also found killed.

McCormick is from Moorestown. “Restless Ghosts” is scheduled for release in 2026.

McCormick has always had an interest in crime. While in Harrisburg, she served on the PA Crime Stoppers Board and started an on-air series called “Wanted in Central Pennsylvania.”

She particularly worked with U.S. marshals to track down Megan’s Law offenders.

McCormick’s penchant for getting a story and being thorough was evident in her reporting.

In an age when it seems TV reporters are content with just getting the basics of their assignments, McCormick stood out as being from what I call the Lu Ann Cahn-Tracy Davidson school of going deep into stories and not settling for the easy information on the surface.

Her reports were hard-nosed and impressed as being complete and objective.

They live up to something else McCormick says in her Facebook farewell, that she “wanted to do the job the Constitution gives us (journalists) the right to do in the most fair and respectful way.”

The type of reporting I describe seems like a reporter’s job, but few on TV news today do it.

McCormick was an dynamic exception amid the bland that local TV news has generally become. In each of the past five years, she was on my list for the market’s Most Valuable Player among local on-air folks.

With her, Davidson, and Rosemary Connors gone, what little depth local news had diminishes some.

Well, at least there’s a nonfiction author (McCormick) and a motivator of real insight and talent (Davidson) doing different work at the same high level.

As for Connors, she has gone far afield and runs a scaffolding business. And Joe Holden, Steve Keeley, and Tim Furlong remainstrong on the reporting front.

Channel 6 has recently had a parade of young reporters, mostly women, showing up out of the blue. I’ve noticed the same on Channel 10. Maybe that’s the current path of local news.

It would be nice if out of that pack, an Annie McCormick or Tracy Davidson emerges.

Burns’ ‘Revolution’ plays well

With only one of the six parts watched, I am impressed with Ken Burns’ new documentary for PBS, “The American Revolution.”

The subject is among my favorites, one that has been a lifelong study, and frankly, I was afraid Burns and writer Geoffrey C. Ward might take a fashionable stance in presenting the material and some of the figures key to the Revolution.

That first installment, “In Order to Be Free,” quelled any anxiety I had about Burns’ or Ward’s objectivity.

As it reviewed events and points of view from 1754 to 1775, I found Ward’s script widely encompassing and complete.

I also enjoyed the commentary of several historians, including two I find the most reliable and the most edifying to read, Alan Taylor and Joseph Ellis.

I consider Taylor, from the University of Virginia, my personal guide to America from first settlement to the Civil War. His many books, all a good read as well as being informative, have provided much of my perspective, as he delves into many things that formed America, and prior to the creation of the United States, and shows how complicated all times are.

I have written to Taylor to suggest books that will most enlighten me on several subjects, Christopher Columbus and the Marquis de Lafayette among them.

His books, often illustrating parallel events throughout the American continent over a given period and able to show the scope, as opposed to the sound bites, of topics like early Native American relations, the War of 1812, and slavery, give an arching overview to American evolution.

Ellis, along with Gordon Wood, not included in Burns’ cadre of historians, has as much as anyone, acquainted me with the characters and contributions of the Founding Fathers, giving me a rounded picture of them.

“The American Revolution” has proven a good digest of events, personalities and ideas that led to America declaring independence in 1776 and, after doing so, crafting the way a government of, by, and for the people might work.

Perhaps I am happiest that so far, Burns and Ward have been fair to and aware of the place of George Washington, who remains in my mind the most important figure in all of American history.

Rather than approaching the remaining five episodes with trepidation, I look forward to seeing how Burns and Ward tell one of the most seminal stories in world history.

I will catch up streaming the parts via Channel 12’s web site.

Kanagawa on ‘Nice List’ and career

Theater provided more than an activity and profession for actor Kennedy Kanagawa.

It gave him a way to cope with several of the cultural and behavioral differences he encountered when he moved with his mother from his native Tokyo at age 10.

“I remember my first day at school in a Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C.,” Kanagawa says by telephone from Bristol, where he was in rehearsal for the Bristol Riverside Theatre’s holiday show, “The Nice List,” which runs from Dec. 9 to 28.

“I was accustomed to bringing lunch from home and eating it in my classroom, so it was a shock to me to go from the classroom, already overwhelming in how relaxed its discipline was, to a central cafeteria where certain kids sat at certain tables, and there was a pecking order involved in it.

“I was appalled when a food fight broke out. Japanese children are so obedient and orderly. I’d never seen, let alone experienced such disorder.

“I kept thinking moving here was the worst. The culture was so different. I was doomed to spend my childhood in a traumatic state. I had no cultural currency to deal with the differences. Definitely a period of adjustment was needed, one in which I could figure out the social hierarchy among kids and fit in more.

“Theater was my means of escape. I’d play different roles in my head to sort out the unwritten rules of American childhood and place where everything was so different from what I knew.”

Actual theater, a place for Kanagawa to perform, learn his craft, and become part of a congenial, better understood community was not far behind. He was doing his first professional work by age 13. His director for that show, an all Asian-American production of William Finn’s “Falsettoland” at New York’s Vineyard Theatre, was Alan Muraoka, who is directing Kanagawa in “The Nice List.”

“It all came about through a family friend,” Kanagawa says, “a girl I knew and had gone to school with in Tokyo.

“My mother and I were visiting her in New York. She was working in the theater. She was the first Asian girl to play Young Cosette in the Broadway version of ‘Les Misérables.’

“My friend’s mother took me and my mother to meet her agent. The agent had me sing ‘Happy Birthday,’ read a few sides (lines of dialogue), and answer some questions. One was when we’re going back to Virginia. My mother said, ‘In two hours.’ The agent said, ‘No, you’re not and gave us the address of a theater that was holding auditions for ‘The King and I.’

“I was cast. It was my first job in the theater. Pretty soon, I was working, and then I was chosen by Alan to play Jason in ‘Falsettolands.’

“I learned so much, not just about theater, but about a vibrant Asian community, and particularly a community of Asian artists. They provided the structure I needed.”

Kanagawa acted in professional and school shows. When it came time for college, he decided he wanted to receive a broad liberal arts and education. He attended Muhlenberg College in Allentown.

“I never left the campus. I discovered Philadelphia and Bucks County later, as an actor. I did follow my plan to study a wide range of subjects, but I majored in theater performance and direction. Studying direction really became important to me as an actor.”

In the past three years, Kanagawa made impressions as the on-stage person who animated Jack in the Beanstalk’s cow in “Into the Woods” and as the irrepressible delivery boy who wants to be a salesman in this August’s “She Loves Me” at Bucks County Playhouse.

“My fiancé teases me that I’ve been in the theater for a couple of decades, and I get cast mostly as animals or kids.

“It’s OK with me. I’m working. And this cast Alan Muraoka assembled for ‘The Nice List’ is incredible. We can’t wait to see other and work together every day.”

Muraoka is known not only for his theater work but for being such an integral part of “Sesame Street” for many years.

Kanagawa says he’s grateful for the career he’s built and for the connection theater has provided him. For now, he’s going from region to region and show to show and loves it.

From his great sense of humor, easy candor, and animated conversation, I’d say the period of adjustment worked in his favor, and his place in the theater is secure.

Scrooge in New Jersey

Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” sets its focal character, Ebenezer Scrooge, squarely in London, but playwrights and overall theater guys Gordon Greenberg and Steve Rosen have found to way to bring literature’s most famous miser-turned-humanitarian anywhere in the world.

Including to your hometown.

At this time, Greenberg and Rosen’s Scrooge is situated in New Brunswick, where they are overworking Bob Cratchit, lecturing his nephew, Fred, about the waste of Christmas, and thwarting do-gooders in “Ebenezer Scrooge’s Big Jersey Christmas Show,” one that localizes the “Christmas Carol” story, trades St. Paul’s Cathedral for Wawa and the Brunswick Square Mall, makes sure to mention Bruce Springsteen, and ends up with Scrooge founding a theater company.

It will be at New Brunswick’s George Street Playhouse through Dec. 21.

“The idea was to do an original take on Dickens’ famous Christmas story, something new regional theaters can give their audiences, something that captures the spirit of ‘A Christmas Carol’ but sets it where the audience lives,” Rosen said.

“We have parameters for what we can do, but the point is to be entertaining as well as economical in terms of characters, language, and storytelling. At George Street, five actors play all of the roles. Only the actor playing Scrooge (Kevin Pariseau) does one part.

“We pepper ‘A Christmas Carol’ with local names, local sites, and local trivia, so audiences listen for the references in addition to seeing Scrooge redeemed.”

The show has had numerous productions and is in constant demand. All a local theater has do is book “Ebenezer Scrooge’s Big (Your Town Here) Christmas Show” and they’re in business.

Greenberg and Rosen say they have a general script with indications of where to mention something or someone the home audience will recognize.

The first stop for the show was New Hope’s Bucks County Playhouse, where Greenberg says producer Robyn Goodman was specific about what she wanted and how to involve the audience.

“The show celebrates a community and its people,” Rosen says. “The structure worked in San Diego, Kansas City, Texas, and all over. We can also scale down the size of the show to suit a theater. The fun is in the references.”

The paradigm of making a classic local can work for many works. Greenberg and Rosen have recently adapted Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” and Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” to fit specific locales.

“The stories are universal and can be set anywhere,” Rosen says. “The philosophy of ‘Crime and Punishment’ is preserved, but its core, a senseless crime and the guilt it engenders, can happen in any place or society.”