playbill vip

DIRECTOR NOTES

Inspired by the 1997 animated film bearing the same name, the musical Anastasia is a work of historical fiction, with a unique twist on the tale of the “lost princess” of Russia. With music penned by Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens, the same songwriting duo that gave us the musicals Once on This Island, Ragtime & Seussical, and a book by four-time Tony Award winner Terrence McNally, Anastasia opened on Broadway in 2017 and ran for two years, spawning a national tour that ran for eighteen months before being cut short by the pandemic.

Having had the opportunity to attend a performance of the national tour in 2019, Anastasia was a show that I knew we would one day produce at Prairie Ridge. It is an adventurous tale of forgotten identity with loveable con-men, a quirky duchess, dour empress and foil who is more misguided than treacherous. Based on a tale of historical intrigue, featuring a plucky princess who has suffered amnesia and tragic loss, Anastasia is a story tailor-made for musical theatre. The original production was at the forefront of a technological shift in theatrical storytelling through its use of ongoing video content, and provides amateur theater companies a meaningful landscape for the integration of twenty-first century technologies, now accessible at a local level, in ways that would have been impossible a decade ago.

It has been an exhilarating and exhausting year of theater at PRHS as we have endeavored to produce two musicals, and I am so very grateful for our team of tireless colleagues and artistic collaborators who have invested their time and talents for the purpose of providing the best possible experience for our students. These colleagues and friends are constantly striving to discover new avenues to teach our students lessons about life by using the arts as the medium for that growth, and I am greatly indebted to them for the sacrifices they made in order to breathe life into a production of this magnitude.

I love the manner in which live theater introduces abstractions via characters with whom an audience can both identify with and reject, without relational consequence. For two hours, one can be enthralled, entertained, challenged, refined, and blissfully immune to the emotions of guilt, remorse, fear, or anger that would invariably accompany such interactions should they occur in the normal course of life. As you enjoy tonight’s performance, we invite you to take a moment to wrestle with the assertions of characters such as the Dowager Empress when she states, “I have found solace in my bitterness. It doesn’t disappoint me.” Or perhaps you will be struck by the plight of Gleb, who has assumed that the completion of his father’s grim mission will bring the absolution and the peace he is missing. As you do, I am hopeful you are able to enjoy the talents of these students and find yourself swept up in the story of the lost princess Anastasia, on her “journey to the past.” 

-David R. Jensen