‘We all grew up on that movie': How a beloved cartoon went from screen to stage

Sydney Morning Herald

2 days ago

If you ask Millennials to name the animated films that shaped their childhoods, it's likely quite a few will point to 1997's Anastasia, which builds upon the discredited myth that an eight-year-old Romanov noble survived the Russian Revolution.
It's a 20th Century Fox production, not Disney (back when those were separate companies), but it has many of the hallmarks that define a classic Disney animated hit of the '90s: a headstrong princess, talking animal companion, dastardly magical villain and catchy songs that stick in your head for, well, the rest of your life.
That last part is due to Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty, who wrote the songs for the movie: she the lyrics, he the music. The pair have collaborated for decades on iconic shows including the multi-Tony-Award-winning Ragtime, so when the movie of Anastasia was being adapted into a stage musical, Ahrens and Flaherty were tapped to revisit their work. The brief was to keep the beloved songs that made the movie so memorable, but add new material and bring the whole thing from the world of animation into something more grounded.
'I think we all grew up on that movie,' says Ahrens. 'We were young writers. We went out to Hollywood, we had a big adventure, we did a movie and then 20 years or something passed. And just like all the little girls who loved that animated movie, we grew up. It was so, not only wonderful, but enlightening to have another look at it and to see it's much richer and much, much more emotional than we had thought of it.'
The talking bat was gone, as was evil wizard Rasputin, as the stage production took a more adult look at the story.
'It was if we were meeting old friends that we had loved that we had not seen for a very long time, and getting a chance to write for these characters and to flesh them out,' says Flaherty. 'Our leading man, for example, he sings in two small parts of two songs in the film, but he never really had his own moment to tell us who he was and what made him tick. And so we got to write two new songs for that character alone.'
It turns out little girls who resonated with the movie in the mid-1990s want to reconnect with their old friends, too. Ahrens remembers clearly the crowd reaction at the show's first performance.
'There were women in the audience dressed like Anastasia, and I nearly lost my mind. They were wearing crowns and wigs and bands, it was incredible. And I realised, oh my God!, these women grew up on this movie ... I began to realise that there was something very profound about the music and about the story that grabbed people as little ones. They've grown up, they've had their own families. Grandmothers come with their daughters, come with their granddaughters.'