Anastasia is one-half of a legitimately charming musical. Until its First Act curtain comes down, the show does just about everything that a good musical can do. This is a lot harder than it looks and a lot better than it sounds. I was glad to sit through just one-half of a musical that works.
Derived and expanded from the popular 1997 animated film, Anastasia has songs by the veteran (meaning roughly as old as me) song team, Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens, whose music here is solidly individuated throughout the First Act and often quite appealing. To dismiss these songs as mere “exposition” is to miss the point. They clearly communicate who each major subsidiary character is (there are four of them) and what they want, as well as the backstory and central desires of the central character herself, Anya — or is she Anastasia?
All of these songs are expertly crafted. Some are beguiling. Each has passion to spare.
Who could ask for anything more?
Terrence McNally’s First Act book is concise, dramatic, character-driven and tartly funny. The costumes by Linda Cho are notably effective at situating the characters tactilely. (I felt I knew the impoverished young Anya/Anastasia better through the belted orange houndstooth sweater that sheathed her from the cold, cold world. That sweater is both worn at the elbows and reminiscently aristocratic. Just like you know who.)
Alexander Dodge’s First Act sets are similarly enveloping but on a pointedly human visual scale. Ever since “The Fall” of Phantom of the Opera’s chandelier back in the Eighties, musical theater scenery has grown to increasingly domineering proportions on Broadway. This, of course, is a broad and somewhat domineering generalization in itself; plenty of musicals have deployed understated set designs since Phantom. Still, most musicals have gone the way of all chandeliers lately. It was nice to look at scenery in Anastasia that unabashedly looked like scenery — imaginatively designed, handsomely executed, even enlivened by some well-integrated projections – but still not pretending to be anything other than the stage constructs they are.
The orchestrations by Doug Besterman left an impression too. I enjoyed savoring their instrumental textures, abetted by noticeably lower amplification in the theater. After a season-full of blaring orchestras blasted through booming mile-high speakers, it was a delight to really hear Anastasia and its rich orchestral accompaniment. I also couldn’t help but notice that most of the principal singing is performed downstage and straight out to the audience. A nice touch that connected us to the performers almost as if in concert.
A number of these performers were terrific, especially Mary Beth Peil as the Dowager Empress, Anastasia’s grandmother (and, as it turns out, Anastasia’s lone Tony nominee); Ramin Karimloo in the thankless role of Anastasia’s villain, a venal Soviet apparatchik (supplanting the animated film’s villain, Rasputin himself); and most delightfully, Christy Altomare as the young title character, in a nicely down-to-earth, yet regally commanding turn.
I’m guessing that much of Anastasia’s theatrical transparency was the vision of director Darko Tresnjak, who employed a similar, nothing-up-my-sleeve, theatrical ingenuity to similarly charming effect in the Tony Award-winning A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder a few seasons ago. Once upon a time (a long time ago), there was an aesthetic in Broadway musicals that I can only describe as: ‘Look what we made.’ It was a style that unapologetically acknowledged everything put before you as handmade. Which only made the marvelous reality of it even more of a marvel.
I can’t say that Anastasia is an entirely good musical, let alone a classic one. The second act is impossible. Once Act I Anya, pretender to the Romanov throne, is acknowledged in Act II to actually be the lone surviving member of Czar Nicholas’s murdered-by-firing-squad family — the Grand Duchess Anastasia herself — the show is stuck. It has to end, but can’t. To proceed as the Grand Duchess to a happy ending is to flout history. To debunk Anastasia as an imposter is not in the interest of a high-ticket Broadway musical. The result is a second act that gets bigger and louder in its songs, sets, projections, costumes and performances, even as it backs away from the inexorable outcome of its own story.
Or, as my eleven-year-old daughter Sara, who simply adores the animated Anastasia, observed: “During the first act, Anastasia looked bigger and sounded bigger than anyone else. The second act shrunk her. She just got small.”