‘Anastasia’ returns to its roots with a new cast, some tweaks
The musical “Anastasia” is about a purported Russian princess who makes an arduous journey to Paris from St. Petersburg in the late 1920s. In the last five years, the show itself has been around the country and the world. The place it has visited most often is Connecticut.
“Anastasia — The New Broadway Musical” (as it is still subtitled) was at the Palace Theater in Waterbury through Thursday, then heads to the Shubert in New Haven, where it will spend the weekend, Oct. 22-24. The “split week” booking is part of a new joint strategy between the Palace and the Shubert to bring more Broadway tours affordably to Connecticut.
Connecticut is where the “Anastasia” musical first started, with its world premiere at Hartford Stage in May of 2016. A Broadway deal was already in the works, and the
show opened in New York City a year later with the same main cast as in Hartford. After a Broadway run of two years, “Anastasia” returned to Hartford on its first national tour, at The Bushnell with a new cast. That first tour. which had a cast of Equity union performers, began in 2018 and had to stop in early 2020 when COVID began to close theaters. A non-equity tour typically follows an Equity tour, and that’s what’s happening now even though the Equity tour didn’t complete all its dates.
In fact, this is the first week of the tour, meaning that Connecticut audiences are the first to see the new cast — basically the second time “Anastasia” has had a premiere in the state.
The show stars Kyla Stone as Anya, who may be the missing Anastasia; Sam Mclellan as Dmitry, the young con artist who becomes Anya’s love interest; Brandon Delgado as Gleb, the Bolshevik general who doggedly pursues Anya; Gerri Weagraff as Anastasia’s grandmother the Dowager Empress; Bryan Seastrom as the goofy Vlad, Dmitry’s mentor in crime; and Madeline Raube as Countess Lily, who has a big number or two when the action moves to Paris in the show’s second half.
Another Connecticut connection: Taya Diggs, one of the two girls who alternate in the role of the young Anastasia in the show’s opening scene, hails from North Haven. The other “Little Anastasia” is Marley Sophia.
Besides the cast, the show has changed quite a bit since it was originally seen in Hartford. The Broadway rendition rethought the big “Paris Holds the Key to
Your Heart” number that kicks off Act Two, chose “The Neva Flows” instead of “A Crowd of Thousands” to end Act One, changed the order of some of the other songs and dropped some numbers entirely. To tour, “Anastasia” lost its multi-turntable stage operation, changing how the showstopping train ride adventure is staged. The scenic design is still defined by gigantic projections as backdrops.
The director of every production of “Anastasia so far — including this tour, the previous tour, the Broadway and Hartford productions
as well as in Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and elsewhere — is Darko Tresnjak, who was the artistic director of Hartford Stage from 2011 to 2019. “Anastasia” was the second musical Tresnjak sent from Hartford to Broadway, following “The Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder,” which won the Tony Award for Best Musical in 2014. Tresnjak did other musicals at Hartford Stage as well: “Kiss Me, Kate” and “The Flamingo Kid.”