A journey to the past can only last so long. Broadway’s musical adaptation of the 1997 animated movie Anastasia has announced that it will close on March 31 this year. The musical, with a book from Terrence McNally, a score by Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens, and direction from Darko Tresnjak, included a lot more music than the original film and several revisions to the plot, including the fact that Rasputin and his talking bat Bartok were replaced by a communist antagonist named Gleb. The musical started performances on March 23, 2017, at the Broadhurst Theatre. By the time it closes, Anastasia will have run for 808 regular and 34 preview performances. That’s a sizable run, though likely not quite the hit the producers were probably hoping for with a big, expensive movie adaptation — it didn’t help that the musical got cool reviews and only two Tony nominations. The production will still live on, however, on tour. Anastasia’s national tour of the U.S. is currently in San Antonio and set to continue through March 2020, and the musical is also currently running in Madrid and Stuttgart, with plans for productions in Holland, Korea, Japan, Mexico, Australia, Brazil, and more locations to come, according to the producers. Congrats to the strapping, floppy-haired actors the world over who get recruited to play Dmitry.
