★★★★★
In a musical about deposed and murdered royalty, Australian theatre supplies two living queens. Rhonda Burchmore and Nancye Hayes finally enter the same story in the second act, and Anastasia rises with them. Like the best fairy tales, their gifts have ignored the passing years.
Anastasia the Musical grew from the beloved 1997 animated film, with composer Stephen Flaherty and lyricist Lynn Ahrens returning to expand their score. Terrence McNally’s book moves the story closer to history. Rasputin and his companion bat Bartok are gone. A Soviet officer takes their place.
Despite the DNA evidence, the survival story remains irresistible. An amnesiac street sweeper called Anya may be the lost Grand Duchess Anastasia. Two con men, Dmitry and Vlad, plan to pass her off as royalty and claim a reward from the Dowager Empress. Their deception becomes complicated when Anya starts remembering things no impostor should know.
Director Darko Tresnjak considers the work a theatrical romance about a family torn apart and improbably reunited. Anastasia’s name means resurrection. Georgina Hopson must resurrect a woman, a dynasty and an audience’s childhood memories. She does it magnificently.
Hopson first appears bundled in coarse wool, her checked skirt and heavy boots suited to the grey streets of Leningrad. Her Anya is watchful, stubborn and ready to fight. The transformation into royalty never erases the survivor underneath.
In My Dreams establishes the scale and clarity of Hopson’s voice. Journey to the Past lets it fill the Festival Theatre. Pink blossoms spread across Paris as the projected city seems to extend around her, bathing the stage in mauve and rose.
Hopson won a Green Room Award for Ragtime, another historical epic by Ahrens and Flaherty. She knows how to locate one woman’s private need inside a score carrying the weight of a nation.
Linda Cho’s costumes make Anya’s uncertain identity visible. The Romanovs appear in pearl-white military uniforms, pale pink gowns, gold embroidery and tiaras, posed like a family portrait moments before history tears through the frame. Cho drew upon Nicholas II’s photographs, portraits and surviving garments.
Leningrad replaces silk with charcoal wool, patched gloves and heavy fur. Paris releases the colour. Anya’s sapphire evening gown is the triumph: sequins pool into dark patterns, crystals loop across her shoulders and hips, and white opera gloves complete the revelation. She does not need a crown. The dress has announced her.
Alexander Dodge’s curved Palladian wall and arched portal suggest both a Fabergé egg and the music box linking Anastasia to her grandmother. Three turntables move between palace, street, nightclub and opera house. Aaron Rhyne’s projections blur physical scenery and cinema.
The reliance on screens may trouble audiences who want a major musical to arrive with trucks full of tangible architecture, especially while technology replaces more of the handmade world. Yet the action would lose velocity without them.
During Once Upon a December, Anya’s family materialise across the palace walls and dance through her fractured memory. A transparent train carriage rotates while green Russian countryside races past.
The performers climb, fight and leap around it with exact timing. Donald Holder’s lighting shifts from the red violence of imperial collapse to frozen streets and the impressionistic warmth of Paris. The projections frequently appear three-dimensional.
West End Marius Robert Tripolino is a fitting prince for Anya. His streetwise Dmitry keeps the journey light, while his chemistry with Hopson peaks in In a Crowd of Thousands. A memory of a boy bowing at a royal parade confirms that their lives crossed long ago.
The song exposes the class argument running through the score. Dmitry was distinguished from thousands when a princess noticed him. Vlad dreams of reclaiming a countess. Anya hopes a street sweeper is somebody special after all.
Even Gleb, charged with defending enforced equality, wants to rise through the Party. Love for Anya collides with loyalty to his father and the system that rewards obedience.
Joshua Robson played the Phantom at Sydney Harbour, and his voice retains too much beauty for Gleb to become a simple monster. He darkens the tone and gives the officer a severe, Javert-like bearing. The humane instrument underneath keeps sounding through.
Replacing Rasputin with Gleb removes some comic wickedness. Bartok devotees may consider the missing bat counter-revolutionary sabotage. The change gives the musical moral weight: a son, lover and Party functionary fight within the same body.
That conflict reaches its most elegant expression during Quartet at the Ballet. Swan Lake is apt: a swan is transformed into a princess while a street sweeper waits to be recognised as one.
Peggy Hickey’s choreography spans imperial mazurkas, Russian folk forms and Jazz Age Charlestons. Here ballet, memory and surveillance share the stage as four characters circle the same revelation. Once Upon a December ghosts the sequence instead of Tchaikovsky.
The fairytale cannot entirely resolve its political contradiction. The Romanovs hoarded extraordinary wealth while much of Russia starved. Revolution answered injustice with terror, firing squads and another hierarchy.
The musical favours the lost princess over the conditions that brought down her palace. It still asks what remains of a promised future when ideology demands the murder of conscience.
Its answer comes through the older generation. Burchmore takes control of the Neva Club in a yellow dress glowing like champagne. She outdrinks the expatriates, mourns yesterday’s Russia and kicks those famous legs high enough to threaten the chandeliers. Her reunion with Dobson’s warm, wily Vlad in The Countess and the Common Man is the evening’s comic summit.
Rhonda Burchmore ruffles Rodney Dobson’s hair, lifts one long leg almost to her head and, after their combustible reunion, invites some cool air beneath her skirt. Revolution has stripped Countess Lily of her Russian privilege.
Hayes offers a different authority. After more than 60 years in Australian theatre, she makes the Dowager Empress formidable against imposters and tender towards Anastasia. Her voice carries age without frailty. The promise of her embrace has pulled Anya across Europe; Hayes makes us wait until trust is earned before opening her arms.
The ten-piece orchestra is smaller than expected, yet Doug Besterman’s orchestrations sound rich. Russian choral, folk and ballet colours give way to the pulse of 1920s Paris. Five film songs remain; the additions give the characters more interior life.
Children who grew up with the animation will recognise its musical spell. Parents bringing very young viewers should know that this version replaces a supernatural villain with firing squads, political persecution and a nightmare of the Romanov execution. It is family theatre with history’s teeth left in.
The myth of Anastasia survives because facts and longing do different jobs. One tells us the child died. The other imagines that she found her way through the darkness, crossed Europe and reached the grandmother who never stopped waiting.
After revolutions, gunshots and a continent crossed, the final image that matters is simple: Nancye Hayes opening her arms.
Anastasia the Musical runs to 30 August at the Festival Theatre Adelaide as part of a national tour.
Tickets: https://anastasiathemusical.com.au/tickets/adelaide/
Website: https://anastasiathemusical.com.au/
Socials: https://www.instagram.com/anastasiathemusicalau/
Photo credits: Jeff Busby
2026 Australian Tour Dates:
Adelaide 2 – 30 August, Festival Theatre
Brisbane 16 September – 25 October, Lyric Theatre QPAC
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