A palpable hit

Q. has a subscription to the Hartford Stage, and now and then kindly invites me to join him. Their artistic director, Darko Tresnjak, clearly believes in More is More. I've seen an absolutely cracking Kiss Me Kate, an annoyingly conceited Romeo and Juliet set in a sandbox, and Hamlet's father's ghost rise up on horseback like the Erl-King to bear his son away. (So much for Fortinbras.) Q. is still raving about Tresnjak's Witches, which I missed.

So when Tresnjak gets his teeth into a brand-new musical, based partly on the Disney [correction: Don Bluth's animated] Anastasia, partly on the Bergman film, and wholly on Quintessence of Princess, it will be lavish. My heavens, it was something else: a triple-layer gilded drum of chocolates, just varied enough not to cloy. Judging by the ecstasies and curtain-calls, it will be bringing 'em in in busloads for the next X years.

At intermission in the lobby, I heard a sweet high soprano burst into Anatasia's big first-act closer, in the time-honored way. I turned round, and saw a very tall, very spidery and spiffy young black man.

I thought it was a decent score, splendidly sung; a pretty fair book (given the essential flaws in the story), well acted; and splendid choreography, splendidly danced. Besides imperial waltzes, kasatskys, and Charlestons, there were cameos for Josephine Baker and Isadora Duncan, and a play-within-a-play Swan Lake, going on while the Dowager and Anya cast "Is it?" and "No, it can't be!" glances, box to box. Everyone adored the comic tango between the rogue who thought he was selling a fake Anatasia to the Dowager, and the cynical Countess (with a good old-fashioned Broadway growl).

But bozhe moy! what shameless spectacle! The curtain rises on a winter palace, with moonlight through the whirling snow, rayed out along the endless marble floor——and a tiny little white bed, with a tiny little nightgowned princess, and the notes of a music box, spangling the air like sparks of snow ... After that, it's one damned jawdropper after another: vistas of St. Petersburg, with sunset on the domes, the Finland Station, all of Paris, and beyond all, the Pont Alexandre at l'heure bleue.

Nine