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.

Give Yourself Over to Absolute Pleasure

Apologies for the too-long absence, I have been hard at work tapping up a storm as Columbia in a production of The Rocky Horror Show.  This is of course the stage version of the '70s movie classic--as a teenager I saw the movie many times at the Key Theater in Georgetown and listened to the soundtrack religiously. I even drew in my diary an approximation of the famously lippy RHPS logo:

Freud would have a field day.  Although he might have a hard time determining whether Frank N. Furter was fixated on the oral or the anal stage.

The meaning behind the tagline never dawned until I was cast in September and then the answer popped into my head.  The movie came out in 1975, and what other "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" film came out that year?  Everyone's favorite updated Moby Dick epic, Jaws.  More on this below.

RHPS somehow manages to simultaneously spoof horror and sci-fi flicks and capture the unabashed hedonism of the '70s, the era of suburban key parties and the gay liberation movement.  Its first song, "Science Fiction Double-Feature," is a roll call of genre classics:

Michael Rennie was ill
The Day the Earth Stood Still
But he told us where we stand
And Flash Gordon was there
In silver underwear
Claude Rains was The Invisible Man
Then something went wrong
For Fay Wray and King Kong
They got caught in a celluloid jam
Then at a deadly pace
It Came From Outer Space
And this is how the message ran...

Fascinatingly, all of the movies listed here are American, and the creator of Rocky Horror, Richard O'Brien, is English.  (Although it should be noted that the Hammer movies, to which RHS also pays homage, were English.) What is it about these British composers who are so well-versed in American pop culture capital?--the song "Tiny Dancer" is so convincingly early '70s Californian in spirit ("blue jean baby, LA lady," "the headlights on the highway," "Jesus freaks, out in the street"), it might have been written by any wistful go-west-young-man free spirit but was instead composed by Bernie Taupin, also English. The American invasion?


And for all of Rocky Horror's celebratory pan-sexualism, it ends on a haunting note--Brad and Janet stumble through the mist in the aftermath, wondering what the hell just happened to them.*

And all I know
Is deep inside I'm
Bleeding...

Perhaps this is the true genius of RHS--embodying the ethos of the '70s, it then anticipates the aftermath, the Big Chill of the '80s.  Gotta pay the piper sometime, sadly...

This poster--and endless riffs thereon--was EVERYWHERE after the movie came out.**

Back to the other set of lips: the movie Jaws is actually quite different from its source book--most people think the movie improves on it, but I have a great fondness for the Benchley novel which is both witty and dark and (like RHPS) very much a product of the '70s (and unlike the Spielberg adaptation which is surprisingly undated, hirsute heroes aside).  The novel is less of a Man vs. Beast thriller and more of an extended metaphor--the shark is not just Brodie's obsession but also a symbol of the forces that threaten to tear apart the town and Brodie's marriage, not the least of which is the sexual revolution which, by 1974 (the year the novel was published) had filtered down to the middle class.  Most memorably, Brodie's wife Ellen has a very brief affair with the ichthyologist Hooper, whose older brother she had dated as a teenager.  Throughout the novel Ellen is a consistently sympathetic character and yet coolly plans and executes extramarital seduction.  What can I say?  It was the '70s--everyone had a lot more sex then.

Key Party







The Ice Storm

Middle class '70s people preparing to have era-appropriate extra-marital sex. You just know Brad and Janet will be hosting the next one.

If you've read the novelization to the Jaws sequel, the first chapter reveals the shark that has come along to terrorize Amity THIS time is pregnant.  Even the shark had sex in Jaws!


*"Super Heroes," and Janet and Brad's bewilderment after their night of debauchery at the castle, always make me think of the last section of Steppenwolf when Harry is wandering through the club.


**Interesting perspective in the poster--in the book the shark is estimated at about 25 feet long but in this picture he sure looks a lot bigger than that!  When Hooper first sees the shark he is euphoric, rhapsodizing "Damn near megalodon!"  C. megalodon was a kind of proto-shark but much bigger and toothier, anywhere from 50 to 100 feet which is frankly terrifying.  

Jaws, the Prequel:
"You're gonna need a bigger--" CHOMP.
The End.