Anastasia on Broadway

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Re: Don Bluth's Anastasia to Be a Stage Musical

Post by Maria_Potter »

A poster has been released! https://twitter.com/anastasiastage/stat ... 5777674240
(it won't let me insert the image for some reason)

What do you think are its chances of getting a Cast Recording?
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Re: Don Bluth's Anastasia to Be a Stage Musical

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Funny I had a dream about the movie last night even though I have never seen it! :)
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Re: Don Bluth's Anastasia to Be a Stage Musical

Post by Sotiris »

The poster's really bad. I like that they tried replicating the reflection motif from the theatrical poster but the execution is plain horrible.

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Re: Don Bluth's Anastasia to Be a Stage Musical

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Sotiris wrote:The poster's really bad. I like that they tried replicating the reflection motif from the theatrical poster but the execution is plain horrible.
PRECISELY.
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Re: Don Bluth's Anastasia on Stage

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Oh my gosh, that looks crazy terrible !! Is that really and truly the poster for it ?!
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Re: Don Bluth's Anastasia on Stage

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The Tony-winning director of the stage production reveals there are 16 new numbers including a song called "Crossing a Bridge".
Q: What changes are being incorporated into it?

Darko Tresnjak: We have the rights to both the animated feature and the original Fox movie with Helen Hayes and Ingrid Bergman. Terrence is really writing his own version of the story. We’ve kept, I think, six songs from the movie, but there are 16 new numbers. We’ve kept the best parts of the animated movie, but it really is a new musical.

Q: Has the casting been announced yet?

Darko Tresnjak: No. We’re pretty much done with casting, but no. What’s interesting is a generation of young women grew up singing some of those songs. Especially the Academy Award nominated “Journey to the Past”. So it was a little bit like auditioning for Scarlett O’Hara. They would come in and some of them couldn’t control their voices. They were so emotional that they got to sing the song in front of the authors.

Q: What are you looking forward to the most when you direct a new show?

Darko Tresnjak: Being in rehearsal is my favorite. Working with great artists like Terrance (McNally), Stephen (Flaherty), and Lynn (Ahrens). One of the best moments was that I talked about how the show takes place in St. Petersburg and Paris and bridges figure so prominently in the story in those two cities. Lynn was like, “Hmm,” and the next morning she showed up with a song called “Crossing a Bridge”. She heard what I said and didn’t even know she was going to do it, but she came up with lyrics for a song and it’s wonderful and it’s great to be a part of that.
Source: http://www.journalinquirer.com/living/c ... 100a2.html


He reveals more details about the production.
The new musical will emphasize some of the darker elements of the story and the innate desire for humans to believe in fairy tales.

Tresnjak maintains that it’s irrelevant that the real Anna Anderson was conclusively proven to be a fraud through DNA testing after the bodies of the Tsar and his family was exhumed in Ekaterinburg, Russia in 1991. It was, after all, just a confirmation of what was believed to be true all along. “What matters is that a fabrication gave birth to a myth and a modern romance,” said the director. “What matters is our need to believe in stories of improbably yet heartbreaking reunions.”

What is apparently new in the musical version is the desire of the Dowager Empress (Mary Beth Peil) to have her granddaughter remain anonymous. “If you lost your whole family and found out that one grandchild has managed to survive, why would you want to put them in the way of assassins?” said Tresnjak.

The director added that he was taken aback at the enduring popularity of the animated film. “When we first announced that we were doing this musical, there was at least 10,000 hits on one website alone within the hour,” he said. “The people just love Stephen and Lynn’s songs. They go to the heart.”
Source: http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story ... t-romantic
Q: We know you have the rights to the animated movie and the Ingrid Bergman movie. We’re sure putting it all together is a huge undertaking and Terrence McNally has a big part in doing that. But as director, how do you approach a project like Anastasia which has so many different facets including multi-media, and the fact we are living in such a multi-media society?

Darko Tresnjak: It’s really interesting because when you take on something like this, nothing takes more time than a world premiere musical. And I’ve directed operas, plays, musicals, operettas – nothing takes more time. It’s years of development. I’ve been working on this already for three years. [...] So with this particular show, it’s an interesting marriage of heart, storytelling, music, and technology. It’s exposing our audience to a whole new thing that we’ve never tried. I don’t want to reveal too many surprises (laughs). [...] So like with Anastasia we felt like it was just taking too long to set up the title character, so we reshaped the first act. It’s one of the biggest things we’ve done over the past four to five weeks of rehearsals. We felt it takes too long to get to her. We needed to recraft it so we moved the leading male role to a later point. So we are aware with something like Anastasia that it has an appeal for a younger audience. I guess we do think about it.
Source: http://somedayprods.com/talking/pillow- ... -tresnjak/
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Re: Don Bluth's Anastasia on Stage

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The final cast has just been announced!
The Hartford Stage production will star Broadway vets Christy Altomare (Mamma Mia!) and Derek Klena (The Bridges of Madison County), who previously appeared onstage together in MCC Theater's 2012 revival of Carrie the Musical, as Anastasia and her love interest, Dmitry. They will be joined by Mary Beth Peil (The Good Wife) as the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna, Manoel Felciano (Disaster!) as Gleb, John Bolton (Dames at Sea) as Vlad, Caroline O'Connor (A Christmas Story) as Lily, and Nicole Scimeca as Young Anya.

The ensemble will be made up of Lauren Blackman, James Brown III, Max Clayton, Janet Dickinson, Constantine Germanacos, Rayanne Gonzales, Ken Krugman, Kevin Ligon, Alida Michal, Shina Ann Morris, Kevin Munhall, Molly Rushing, Johnny Stellard, Samantha Sturm, Maxwell Carmel, Katherine McLellan, and Riley Briggs.
Source: http://www.courant.com/entertainment/be ... story.html
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Re: Don Bluth's Anastasia on Stage

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The songwriters talk about the stage production in length and reveal lots of new information. They confirm Rasputin and Bartok won't be in it.
When it bows in Hartford this spring, the writers state that audiences will encounter much of what they loved from the film with a more human and historic take.

Q: How did you begin adapting and expanding the animated version of Anastasia for the stage?

Lynn Ahrens: The first thing we wanted to do was write a whole original score, and we wanted to take some of the songs that we love that we wrote back then and put them onstage, but in a new way—re-position them, or rewrite them in some way. We really wanted to approach the show from a different musical vantage point: a little more sophisticated, more far-reaching, more political.

Stephen Flaherty: I remember the day clearly where we were in an Au Bon Pain in New York City as we were working on the film, and somebody just throws out this notion, “What if Rasputin just rises from the dead and is accompanied by an albino bat!?” And at that moment in time you realize, “Oh, it’s gonna be that. It’s going to move over that way,” and it’s out of the blue. But you’re a hired gun working in Hollywood, doing the best you can to write a beautiful score, but not having control over your destiny. So we wanted to use the film and the legend of Anastasia as the jumping off point, but it’s really an original musical dealing with more of the history. Terrence McNally came on board, which is thrilling because I don’t think he was interested in just doing the film and putting it right up on a stage.

Q: So the word from workshops is that Rasputin and Bartok the bat are gone and that the show has a historic and human focus now hold true?

Lynn Ahrens: He’s gone. And the bat is gone. They’re gonna be in our cabaret act, though. We’re gonna bring ‘em back. They may have a little homage here or there, maybe. But basically, there’s a new character who represents the Communist Regime. He’s a contemporary, more of a contemporary figure. He’s in post-revolutionary Russia, he’s a Czechist as they called them. And the score’s really interesting. For example, there’s an opening number in the movie called “Rumor in St. Petersburg” and we kept that, but it’s completely re-written, opened up, all the main characters are introduced. It’s a theatrical number now, as opposed to a fun song for an animated movie. And “Journey to the Past,” which is one of the famous songs, and the song that got [Oscar] nominated, has been moved to an entirely different place in the score, where I think it’s going to be even more effective, actually, and in between there’s all kinds of new stuff.

Stephen Flaherty: That was the real excitement: going back in and seeing things that you loved, but also thinking, “How can this function onstage? How can we even make this?” The character of Anya, her trajectory in the stage version is huge. And with the exception, I think, of two scenes, she is on the stage all the time—I mean, it’s like the Olympics.

Lynn Ahrens: Anya, of course, is a character who has to go from the old world of the Tsars and so on, born to that, into a new world and discover herself in that new world. And she’s a lost character who’s going to find out who she is and what she actually wants in the new world.

Q: How many new songs have you written for Anastasia?

Lynn Ahrens: Something like 15 or 16?

Stephen Flaherty: We’re writing one now.

Lynn Ahrens: We’re writing one now, literally.

Stephen Flaherty: We were doing it this morning.

Lynn Ahrens: There are lots of good songs; we’re very excited. We haven’t written such a song-heavy score for a while where there are a lot of, not so much solos, but real character songs where they step out and have a great number. There are a lot of them in this.

Stephen Flaherty: But there are also a lot of sequences, as well. Musically, Act One is Russia; Act Two is 1920s Paris, and just creating those two musical worlds and watching the characters go through the old world and then the new—it’s really exciting.

Q: You could have fast-tracked Anastasia and made it a literal translation of the film onto the stage. What prompted you to take your time on this and reconsider how it might work?

Lynn Ahrens: I think the biggest change was at 20th Century Fox, because movie companies move slowly, one by one became interested in taking their films and making them into stage musicals. I think that Fox slowly came to realize that they had some very great movies that might translate to stage. And they got people on board: Kevin McCollum is now working for Fox developing some of their movies. I think it was a coming together of movie company and theatre company wanting to do it.

Stephen Flaherty: But there’s a new structure, and we felt really excited about it, and then we had to present it to 20th Century Fox. They can either say yes or no, and we just felt this is a very exciting way to go. Luckily, they agreed. There was a conscious need to tell the story in a different way that was maybe more respectful or more based on the real history.

Lynn Ahrens: Well, more realistic to Russia, to the history. I think that’s a wonderful thing that has come into the show.

Q: You’re working with Tony-winning A Gentleman's Guide to Love & Murder director Darko Tresnjak on Anastasia. What’s his way into this world and how the show lives onstage?

Lynn Ahrens: It’s pretty big. It’s feeling like it’s going to be romantic and sweeping, and it’s going to have an epic quality, I think, visually.

Stephen Flaherty: It’s so funny, I’m feeling it the other way. A lot of the moments are focused on a smaller group of people against a larger backdrop.

Lynn Ahrens: Visually, I think it’s going to be extraordinary and, at least from the designs we’ve seen, they look spectacular. Darko’s way into it—his family history—is of an aristocratic family who lost their fortune and were basically evicted from their country, so he has a sort of an emotional bond to the tale. When we first talked to him about the project, he brought in these big sheets of visuals: everything from the bustles, and the trains ,and the jewels and pictures of the royal family to pictures of Paris in the ‘20s.

Q: Hartford Stage is also where Gent’s Guide was born prior to Broadway. Is there hope that Anastasia will have the same trajectory?

Lynn Ahrens: We’re hoping! We’re all hoping together!
Source: http://www.playbill.com/article/how-ahr ... -the-stage
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Re: Don Bluth's Anastasia on Stage

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Aw, man. Rasputin was my favorite part of the movie...he was so cool. He had magic. He did cool stuff.
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Re: Don Bluth's Anastasia on Stage

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Terrence McNally, who wrote the libretto, talks about the differences between the stage adaptation and the film versions.
McNally ( The Visit, Ragtime) is quick to point out that the new musical is very different from the movie, in both book and music. “This is a stage version for a modern theatre audience,” the four-time Tony winner says. Nominated for two Oscars for their work on the film, Ahrens and Flaherty’s new score includes the Oscar-nominated tune “Journey to the Past,” as well as five revised songs from the movie, plus 16 new songs.

And the new libretto? “Once you have a live character onstage,” McNally says, “it’s such a totally different expression than a cartoon figure. I never felt as if I was adapting a cartoon. I think the story was too real. This story happened less than 100 years ago and has entered the collective consciousness as a fairy tale. Most fairy tales are buried further back in time. This is a contemporary one.” He also had access to the 1956 movie Anastasia, with Ingrid Bergman, “and of course the story’s in the public domain.”

The libretto’s “a blend” of old and new, according to McNally. “There are characters in the musical that appear in neither the cartoon nor the Ingrid Bergman version.” Felciano plays a new character, Gleb, “basically a police officer assigned to the case,” McNally says. He’s tasked with determining if this girl is or is not the Czar’s daughter. After all, “the Bolshevik government doesn’t want a legitimate heir to the Russian throne to be alive.”

McNally is hopeful that Anastasia has a life beyond Hartford. “It’s a dream of every show to end up in New York. But I’ve been doing this long enough to know: Let’s get it right in Hartford. And, if you get it right in Hartford, it will end up in the right place.”
Source: http://www.playbill.com/article/what-to ... -anastasia


Lynn Ahrens, the lyricist, talks about the process of bringing Anastasia to the stage.
"The idea to bring it to the stage has been kicking around for years," said Ahrens, the team's lyricist, in a recent phone interview. "We had such a wonderful time doing the movie. Bringing it to the stage is a whole new challenge. We've created a different take from either movie." Four or five songs have been retained from the animated "Anastasia" ("the ones that were nominated," as Ahrens puts it), and 15 brand-new songs have been added.

Reworking "Anastasia" has also allowed the creative team to rein in some of the excesses of the film versions. "Rasputin didn't really start the Russian Revolution. In the animated movie, he came back from the dead to do so." The new musical version does take some liberties with Russian history itself, but it's because "we're writing about the myth of Anastasia," Ahrens says. "The fact that the myth came to be is extraordinary."

To revise the show's book, Flaherty and Ahrens reached out to McNally, who collaborated with the songwriting team on the musical "Ragtime." "We suggested Terrence for this," Ahrens says. "For 'Ragtime,' he suggested us. This time, we suggested him. His writing has such an historical weight, an emotional weight." Ahrens says McNally has created metaphors and subtexts that will draw audiences further into the story. "You're rooting for these lovers, but really you're rooting for this idea of finding one's family."

The other key member of the team is director (and Hartford Stage artistic director) Darko Tresnjak, who chose "Anastasia" as the first musical he's doing at Hartford Stage since his Tony-winning success with "A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder." "Darko came in when we had a very solid third draft," Ahrens recalls. "He was the clear and obvious choice."

Ahrens describes Tresnjak as "brilliant, kind, energized," and goes on to praise the entire staff of Hartford Stage. Working with a director who's the artistic director of a theater, she suggests, gives the project a different sort of dedication and a different level of resources than it might have gotten elsewhere. "The physical production," Ahrens gushes, "is going to be spectacular. There are 136 costumes. Magnificent sets. It's bigger than a normal out-of-town try-out."
Source: http://www.courant.com/entertainment/ar ... story.html
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Re: Don Bluth's Anastasia on Stage

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Damn, this thing will have 22 songs? Is that one of the longest lists of songs any musical has ever had?!
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Re: Don Bluth's Anastasia on Stage

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Have you heard? Anastasia's coming to Broadway!
Stage Entertainment USA and Tom Kirdahy announced on Friday that they will produce Anastasia during the 2016-17 season, at a Shubert theater to be announced.
Source: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/a ... way-884364


The show will be slightly delayed due to technical difficulties.
Anastasia, the new musical from the Tony-winning team of Lynn Ahrens, Stephen Flaherty and playwright Terrence McNally, has canceled its first preview in Hartford, CT due to technical demands of the Broadway-bound production. Performances were to begin the evening of May 12. Anastasia will now begin public performances May 13.

“Due to the complex technical requirements of Anastasia, we have made the difficult decision to cancel tonight’s first preview performance. All patrons who have tickets are being notified and will be able to obtain seats for another performance. Given the large scope of all elements of design for this show, we want to ensure that we have adequate technical rehearsal time for the safety of our cast and crew prior to a public performance. Thank you for your understanding. We anticipate no further delays, and look forward to starting performances of this beautiful show on Friday,” said Michael Stotts, Hartford Stage managing director in a statement.
Source: http://www.playbill.com/article/anastas ... st-preview
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Re: Don Bluth's Anastasia on Broadway

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Interviews with the cast and crew.

Off Script with Dan Dwyer: Director Darko Tresnjak, Part 1
http://podcasts.am1020whdd.com/~am1020w ... 98&cat=197

Off Script with Dan Dwyer: Director Darko Tresnjak, Part 2
http://podcasts.am1020whdd.com/~am1020w ... 99&cat=197

Backstage with Johnny O!: Hartford Stage / TheatreWorks New Milford
http://johnnyo829.podomatic.com/entry/2 ... 6_35-07_00
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Re: Don Bluth's Anastasia on Broadway

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The musical numbers have been revealed! All the songs from the movie are included except for "In the Dark of the Night" and "At the Beginning".

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Source: https://www.hartfordstage.org/wp-conten ... stasia.pdf


The first publicity stills have been released. You can find more, here.

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Re: Don Bluth's Anastasia on Broadway

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I like Anastasia's (the character's) look, and the set.
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Re: Don Bluth's Anastasia on Broadway

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Articles

Young musical pros Altomare, Klena discuss roles in 'Anastasia' stage version
http://www.examiner.com/article/young-m ... ge-version

Tony-winning director debuts new ‘Anastasia’ musical at Hartford Stage in CT
http://www.examiner.com/article/tony-wi ... d-stage-ct

Derek Klena on a more true-to-life Anastasia and the evolution of the highly-anticipated new musical
http://stagedoordish.com/derek-klena-on ... w-musical/

Christy Altomare discusses how playing the titular role in Broadway-bound Anastasia changed her life
http://stagedoordish.com/christy-altoma ... -her-life/

Interview with Ragtime and Anastasia's Lynn Ahrens
http://www.londontheatre.co.uk/londonth ... view16.htm

‘Anastasia,’ All Grown Up With Somewhere to Go
http://www.americantheatre.org/2016/06/ ... ere-to-go/

Christy Altomare on Being the Lifelong "Fanastasia" Who Gets to Play Anastasia
http://www.theatermania.com/hartford-th ... 77355.html

Anastasia’s Leading Lovers on How the Story Has Been “Enhanced” for the Stage
http://www.playbill.com/article/anastas ... -the-stage

‘Anastasia’ Takes Home 7 Connecticut Critics Circle Awards
http://www.americantheatre.org/2016/06/ ... le-awards/
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Re: Don Bluth's Anastasia on Broadway

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A bunch of new production photos have been released. You can find more, here. It looks so good!

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Re: Don Bluth's Anastasia on Broadway

Post by DisneyFan09 »

It's no surprise that it's heading to Broadway. All of it's choreographed moments just screamed Broadway.

What are your thoughts on Anastasia?
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Re: Don Bluth's Anastasia on Broadway

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DisneyFan09 wrote:What are your thoughts on Anastasia?
I love it! It's my favorite Don Bluth movie.
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Re: Don Bluth's Anastasia on Broadway

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It does look good!
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