‘Anastasia’ musical in Connecticut this week with a new cast and 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.

New cast

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.

Changes

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.”

Choreographer Peggy Hickey, who has worked regularly with Tresnjak for years (including shows at Goodspeed), has also been a part of all the “Anastasia”s.

Those who haven’t yet experienced “Anastasia” should know that it’s based on two different movies inspired by the Russian legend about young Anastasia Romanov escaping when the rest of the family of Tsar Nicholas II were killed in 1918 during the Russian Revolution. (In reality, it has long been confirmed that Anastasia died alongside her family.) The better-known cinematic source is the 1997 animated film directed by Don Bluth; the stage musical has stripped away its villain, Rasputin, as well as its funny cartoon bat. The other film is from 1956 and stars Yul Brynner and Ingrid Bergman.

But the stage “Anastasia” also creates whole new characters and situations. The musical’s book was written by Terrence McNally, the acclaimed playwright (”Love! Valour! Compassion”) whose other musicals include “Kiss of the Spider Woman.” The songs are by Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens, who wrote many of them (including the Oscar-nominated “Journey to the Past”) for the animated film. McNally, Flaherty and Ahrens all worked together previously on the film of “Ragtime.”

“Anastasia” is at the Shubert, College St., New Haven, shubert.com, with performances on Oct. 22 at 8 p.m., Oct. 23 at 2 and 8 p.m. and Oct. 24 at noon and 5:30 p.m. $44 to $126.

Christopher Arnott can be reached at carnott@courant.com.