‘We all grew up on that movie’: How a beloved cartoon went from screen to stage

If you ask Millennials to name the animated films that shaped their childhoods, it’s likely quite a few will point to 1997’s Anastasia, which builds upon the discredited myth that an eight-year-old Romanov noble survived the Russian Revolution.

It’s a 20th Century Fox production, not Disney (back when those were separate companies), but it has many of the hallmarks that define a classic Disney animated hit of the ’90s: a headstrong princess, talking animal companion, dastardly magical villain and catchy songs that stick in your head for, well, the rest of your life.

Tessa Sunniva van Tol as Anastasia/Anya and Milan van Waardenburg as Dimitri in a Dutch production of Anastasia.Credit: Roy Beusker

That last part is due to Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty, who wrote the songs for the movie: she the lyrics, he the music. The pair have collaborated for decades on iconic shows including the multi-Tony-Award-winning Ragtime, so when the movie of Anastasia was being adapted into a stage musical, Ahrens and Flaherty were tapped to revisit their work. The brief was to keep the beloved songs that made the movie so memorable, but add new material and bring the whole thing from the world of animation into something more grounded.

“I think we all grew up on that movie,” says Ahrens. “We were young writers. We went out to Hollywood, we had a big adventure, we did a movie and then 20 years or something passed. And just like all the little girls who loved that animated movie, we grew up. It was so, not only wonderful, but enlightening to have another look at it and to see it’s much richer and much, much more emotional than we had thought of it.”

The talking bat was gone, as was evil wizard Rasputin, as the stage production took a more adult look at the story.

“It was if we were meeting old friends that we had loved that we had not seen for a very long time, and getting a chance to write for these characters and to flesh them out,” says Flaherty. “Our leading man, for example, he sings in two small parts of two songs in the film, but he never really had his own moment to tell us who he was and what made him tick. And so we got to write two new songs for that character alone.”

Ad Knippels and Gerrie van der Klei in a Dutch production of AnastasiaCredit: Roy Beusker

It turns out little girls who resonated with the movie in the mid-1990s want to reconnect with their old friends, too. Ahrens remembers clearly the crowd reaction at the show’s first performance.

“There were women in the audience dressed like Anastasia, and I nearly lost my mind. They were wearing crowns and wigs and bands, it was incredible. And I realised, oh my God!, these women grew up on this movie ... I began to realise that there was something very profound about the music and about the story that grabbed people as little ones. They’ve grown up, they’ve had their own families. Grandmothers come with their daughters, come with their granddaughters.”

That intergenerational love for the show struck a chord with her. “I don’t read reviews, no matter what they are, good, bad or indifferent,” Ahrens says. “We just have to love our work and believe in our work and write the next show, and with Anastasia, it’s proven itself to be this extraordinary, I don’t want to say juggernaut, that’s the wrong word, but it just keeps going. It’s been in Mexico, it’s been in Spain, it’s been in the Netherlands, it’s been in Japan, and everywhere it goes, the audiences leap to their feet.”

Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens, who wrote the music for AnastasiaCredit: Nathan Johnson

She may not read reviews, but the pair are very aware the ones for the Broadway version of the show covered the gamut from good to bad to indifferent, with famed theatre critic Ben Brantley describing it in The New York Times as “a chore”. I suggest to Ahrens and Flaherty that perhaps Brantley might not be the show’s target audience.

They suggest many creators would consider Brantley a target indeed – but in perhaps a different sense. “And also, I should point out he was the longest drama critic working for The New York Times in the history of The New York Times, and that’s not always a good thing. So we’ve moved on, and so has The New York Times.”

“When you get to New York, you expect to be bludgeoned,” adds Ahrens. “And then they go on to be classics and international hits. And Seussical was killed on Broadway, absolutely killed.”

Seussical, based on the books of Dr Seuss, was another Ahrens and Flaherty collaboration, and the reviews were, frankly, dreadful. It closed after six months, becoming one of Broadway’s most infamous flops. Its untimely death still seems to be a sore spot.

“We used to be tall,” Ahrens jokes.

“I was 6′5,” says Flaherty – yes, they do finish each other’s sentences, after such a long working partnership – “and I was 5′10″, and look at us now,” says Ahrens. “That’s from Seussical, and yet it is the most performed [children’s] show in America.”

Australia will be the 12th country to stage Anastasia, and it has been in nearly continuous production somewhere in the world since 2016, excepting COVID lockdowns. “It’s like a teacher gives a hard time to a kid and then you send it out in the world and it becomes a super brilliant genius,” Ahrens says. Much like the titular princess herself.

Anastasia opens at Melbourne’s Regent Theatre in December 2025 and Sydney’s Lyric theatre in April 2026.

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