Journey to the Past

Recently my friend Michael invited me to one of the first performances of the new Broadway musical Anastasia.

I can be difficult company at historical plays. It's not that I want to find things wrong--it's that I just cannot turn off my inner historian's hair trigger. [I remember watching A Man For All Seasons and grumbling "The Duke of Norfolk is getting an awfully sympathetic edit here..."*] And I had strong reservations about Anastasia's source material, the 1997 animated film. Turning the story of the massacre of the Romanovs, Russia's Imperial family, into a cartoon fantasy, complete with a literally demonic Rasputin and his cutesy bat sidekick [confusingly named Bartok] seems horribly tasteless. 

Uh, Dad? Why do I have a Hungarian name?
Also--damn, Grisha, get those talons a manicure!

Anastasia and her family were gunned down and bayoneted and bashed in the basement of the House of Special Purpose. Not by a cartoon demon but by the Bolsheviks, by men, by actual people who murdered them at point blank range in the middle of the night. Their bodies were groped and violated. And then dumped in a pit and doused with acid. In 1997 when the movie came out, they had family members who still mourned them, perhaps even still remembered them. Papering over the violence to this degree feels offensively naive.

I didn't mind the wistful "What if...?" angle--what IF a miracle happened and Anastasia somehow survived the massacre, and went on to reclaim her heritage, or just to live. I think it's entirely understandable, and quite human, to want to imagine a kinder end for at least one of those beautiful children. [And I think it's why there are so many time travel novels involving the massacre at the Ipatiev House--this is one of my favorites.] 

But for God's sake, at least blame the right people! The movie describes Rasputin as "the former royal advisor of the Romanovs until he was banished by Nicholas II for treason"? If only that had been the case! For all Rasputin's many, MANY faults [like sleeping his way through the Russian court, as well as his spectacularly bad political judgment], he was certainly loyal to the Imperial Family and saved the life of the Tsarevich on several occasions. When he was finally assassinated, after years of disastrous advice to the Tsar, the empress and the children were devastated. Maybe if Nicky had taken charge and dumped Rasputin a good five years sooner, the war [and possibly the Revolution, although that was coming anyway] would've gone differently.

MAJOR SIDEBAR ALERT:

And of all the characters who played a major role in the lead-up to the 1917 Revolution, Rasputin is hardly someone who needs help to be even more interesting. Dude was fucking LIT--for someone who, uh, wasn't exactly into personal hygiene, he had a ridiculous amount of success with the ladeez of the Imperial court.  And he was basically impossible to kill--his assassins fed him poisoned cakes and poisoned wine and when those had no effect, they shot him. Several times. They finally ended up throwing him into the icy Neva.

Ah'll be bawck.

And Rasputin is the quintessence of a certain phenomenon I have observed when studying Russian history--sometimes there are things that just cannot be explained. Events, fully testified and documented, with witnesses, that simply defy rational explanation. Rasputin embodied this, and the most dramatic example has to be the incident at Spala. 

Spala, Poland was the site of Nicholas's hunting lodge and in 1912, while the Imperial family was staying there, the Tsarevich Alexei [Anastasia's little brother and the heir to the throne, who had hemophilia] was suffering from terrible internal bleeding due to his illness. For several days he was either unconscious or in tremendous pain. The situation was terminal, and he was finally administered last rites. 

In desperation the Tsaritsa, Alexei's mother, cabled Rasputin, who had stopped the boy's bleeding on many previous occasions--but always in person. From back in Siberia, Rasputin sent a reply telegram to the Tsaritsa.  The Little One will not die. Do not allow the doctors to bother him too much. 

Within hours the bleeding had stopped. 

Like I said--Rasputin is really not someone you have to make even more interesting!

Anyway. Back to Broadway. So I went in with shoulders squared and eyes squinted--I was prepared To Judge and Find It Wanting. And I have to say.....I was pleasantly surprised. For the most part they got her title [Grand Duchess or Великая Княжна, not Princess] correct and only once did they address her as Your Majesty [as Anastasia was never a Queen or Empress, she would've been correctly styled as Your Highness or Your Imperial Highness]. At one point during Anya's My Fair Lady sequence, the script even mentioned that the Russian court spoke in French, not Russian. 

And the design! The opening sequence, a ballroom dance featuring OTMA [the collective nickname for Anastasia and her three sisters, Olga, Tatiana and Marie] dancing in full court dress was impressively well-researched--someone earned their paycheck with that stunning tableau!

Interestingly the stage version adds a dimension not seen in the 1997 film--we see the aftermath of the Revolution, everyday life in Soviet St. Petersburg Petrograd Leningrad, which is appropriately bleak for everyone but Party members. 

The Neva flows
A new wind blows
And what's that awful smell
The leaves unfold
The Tsar lies cold
Now he's drinking his vodka in hell

Now that's some hardcore Russian fatalism!

But whether or not this works--this added dimension--is subject to debate. Revolution is not easy to musicalize--Les Miserables pulls it off but that is a huge sweeping story with a ton of characters. Anastasia is not so ambitious--it's about one young woman's attempt to reclaim her memory and her identity, her "journey to the past." A truthful depiction of Soviet Russia in the 1920s would be brutally incompatible with the tone of "Anya's" character arc--the plucky orphan, conquering all through purity of heart. An added character named Gleb, a Cheka officer who is simultaneously drawn to Anya and yet duty-bound to assassinate her, follows her to Paris with gun drawn--but in the end he is unable to kill her. Trust me when I say the Cheka [or the GPU, or whatever the hell they were calling the secret police at this point] would not look AT ALL kindly on his failure!

And the musical does evoke the grace and elegance of those pre-War days, with those lovely young Grand Duchesses fluttering like swans, swirling elegantly across the stage. "There was a glamor to it, a perfection and a completeness and a symmetry to it like Grecian art." Not the elegy these sweet children, these lovely young women (and one beloved brother) deserve but rather more than the 1997 film afforded them.

Ольга Николаевна
Татьяна Николаевна
Мария Николаевна
    Анастасия Николаевна
    Алексе́й Никола́евич

*In AMFAS the Duke is portrayed as basically decent albeit pragmatic type, a friend to Thomas More. In real life he was a bloodless manipulator and had zero problem exploiting two of his nieces for every scrap of political advantage he could get. Anne Boleyn [his sister Elizabeth's daughter] more or less knew what she was doing but I'll never forgive him for selling Catherine Howard [his brother Edmund's daughter], a young and silly and beautiful teenager, a girl, into a disastrous marriage with Henry VIII and then washing his hands of the matter when things inevitably went south.

The (Almost Wasn't) King's Speech

Congratulations to The King's Speech for their Best Picture Oscar--I saw this wonderful movie back in January and loved it.  Between scenes, I told my friend in whispers all the back story--the Edward VIII/George VI generation is one of my favorites of the British royal family, there's something so adorable and cozy about the four (five)* brothers and their one lovely sister, all arranged in those adorable outfits.

(l-r, Prince Henry, later Duke of Gloucester; the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VIII, laterLATER the Duke of Windsor; 

Prince John; Prince Albert, later Duke of York, laterLATER King George VI; Princess Mary, later the Princess Royal; 

and Prince George, later Duke of Kent)

The movie takes place during the '30s and as such, it is odd to realize--this is about the current Queen's father.  Just one generation ago, they were grappling with an abdication crisis, precipitated by the determination of the Prince of Wales to marry a divorcée, which was seen as completely unsuitable.  Oh, how times have changed!

I keep comparing it to a TV movie I watched through Netflix called Bertie and Elizabeth--quite different in scope (it encompassed a much longer period, from their courtship in the '20s through to his accession and World War II) , it nonetheless overlaps somewhat with The King's Speech.  And both of them have the Slutty Music Cue for Wallis Simpson--when she first appears on the screen, the soundtrack helpfully cues us what to think about her by blowing a hot blue riff on a sexophone saxophone.  

(Skip to 6:52--yep, there ol' Wallis is getting out of the car, primed for seduction and empire-razing.  Good times.)

At any rate, I've always had a fondness for the current queen's father--he had an idyllic. domestic life with his charming Scottish wife, Lady Elizabeth (born in haunted Glamis Castle!) and his two little princesses, Lilibet and Margaret Rose, "us four" as he termed them.  And then his feckless brother couldn't hack it as King and forced him to step up to the plate and he did so beautifully.  The King's Speech takes a few historical liberties but generally gets the flavor right--my favorite scene was when he is marching to the microphone to make the speech to his people at the end, on the cusp of World War II.  The look of terror and resolve on his face breaks your heart and makes you realize what an incredibly brave man he was.

Another fascinating portrait of that generation of Windsors is the BBC production The Lost Prince, about the events leading up to World War I from the point of view of Prince John.  Through the Prince we get to see not only that lovely, lost, pre-World War I European way of life, we also get to meet his cousins, the Romanovs, who were related to the Windsors in a couple of ways (Alexandra was a granddaughter of Queen Victoria).  In fact Nicholas and George V were twin cousins:

♫ They laugh alike, they walk alike, at times they even talk alikeYou can lose your mind ... when cousins are two of a kind! ♫

*I say five because of Prince John, the hidden sibling, one of my favorite phenomena.  There's something so interesting about a large family with a sibling that never emerges for whatever reason--the Kennedys had one (Rosemary, the oldest daughter, who had some kind of mental problem that was never satisfactorily identified before she was lobotomized) and my own father's generation had one--his youngest sister died quite young of a heart ailment.  Each one of those siblings is a whole life that was never fully realized--a whole story that was never told.  At any rate Prince John had epilepsy and lived away from court, and ended up dying at the age of 13, adding further fuel to the superstition that John is a bad luck name for English royalty.