A JOURNEY TO THE PAST IN ANASTASIA

BY JOHN MOORE

IIf you didn’t know better, you might be hard-pressed to believe that the same songwriting team wrote the vastly di erent musicals Lucky Sti , Ragtime, Once On This Island, Seussical and Anastasia. That span covers madcap farce, historical drama, Caribbean-flavored deities, children’s theater and an adapted animated fantasy.

And that’s just a small sample from the catalog of Theatre Hall of Famers Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty, whose Anastasia takes on the enduring myth of the Russian Duchess long hoped to have survived the massacre of the Imperial Romanov family.

of her past, two con men make plans to pass her o as the real thing to the Dowager Empress in Paris, hoping to get money from the woman who would be Anastasia’s grandmother. The sadistic Rasputin has been replaced here by Gleb, a Bolshevik general who has orders to hunt down and kill the girl.

The stage musical is an adaptation of the classic animated 1997 film with an original score by Ahrens and Flaherty. “Ever since, we wished someone would make it into a stage musical one day — and take us along for the ride,” Ahrens said.

Nearly 20 years later, they got their wish.

In keeping with their mantra of not repeating themselves, the songwriters dug in to create something completely new. They kept just six songs from the film score and wrote 16 new ones.

“We really wanted to re-conceive the story, re-examine the myth and, frankly, be more historically accurate,” Flaherty said. “We were literally going from a twodimensional medium into a three-dimensional medium, so we felt the characters needed to have more depth and drama in their lives.”

“Lynn and I don’t like to repeat ourselves. We really try to go in di erent directions,” Flaherty said of these 40-year collaborators.

What most appealed to Ahrens and Flaherty about Anastasia was its irresistible legend. “It’s not a true story; we all know that,” said Ahrens. “We know what happened to Anastasia. We know where her ashes are. But the myth that she may have somehow survived has persisted for all these years….”

Anastasia is set years after the execution of Tsar Nicholas II and his family. It opens as a young amnesiac shows up in Russia with only a few hazy memories and a keepsake that suggests she might be Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna. As “Anya” sets out to discover the mystery

What they came up with, Ahrens believes, is a story that is just as transporting as the source film, but in a more grown-up way. “Obviously, kids can come and have a great time. But this is a more grown-up version of the Anastasia tale,” Ahrens said. “This is more romantic and more adventurous. We have real relationships and real family connections.”

To any Anastasia film fans coming to see the musical for themselves, Ahrens says, in a nutshell: “Fasten your seat belts and prepare for something that’s the same — only different.”