Anya

• Original Broadway Production (1965)
  New York, NY
• Johannesburg Revival (1981)

Click on the title for info on the song.

Original score

• Anya
• A Song from Somewhere
  • aka That Song [no note]
• Vodka, Vodka!
• So Proud
• Homeward
• Snowflakes and Sweethearts (The Snowbird Song)
  • aka Snowflakes and Sweethearts [no note]
  • aka Snowflakes and Sweethearts: The Snowbird Song [no note]
  • aka The Snowbird Song [no note]
• On That Day
• Six Palaces
• Hand in Hand
• This Is My Kind of Love
  • aka My Kind of Love [no note]
• That Prelude!
• A Quiet Land
• Here Tonight, Tomorrow Where?
• Leben Sie Wohl
  • aka Live Well [no note]
• If This Is Goodbye
• Little Hands
• All Hail the Empress

Cut prior to opening

• Now is My Moment
• Drawn to You
• Hail the Mighty Queen
• A Sense of Love and Humor
• Love and a Legacy

Ten years of turmoil have passed since the assassination of Tsar Nicholas, Empress Alexandra, their son ands four daughters but there has always been one burning question...did the youngest girl, Grand Duchess Anastasia survive the bloodbath? Now, in 1927 Berlin, a refugee calling herself Anya has turned up having the bearing, speech and intimate knowledge of the Imperial family the only the real Anastasia could have had.

Prince Bounine, former of the Royal Cossacks under the Tsar, who had seen the little Grand Duchess many times, (and who is now a Berlin taxi driver) has made up his mind that Anya is "the real thing" but concludes that she suffers from a form of amnesia which will not allow her to recall herchildhood. Bounine takes Anya under his wing hoping that she will help him (and the other Russian emigres) to stake a claim to the 10,000,000 pounds purportedly life by the last of the Romanovs in a British bank.

In a series of encounters with former familiars and some of the other emigres living in Berlin who had been members of the Royal Court, Anya begins to display qa confidence asnd style astonishes the other interlocutors, yet she seems more interested in recovering her own identity than in the Imperial bank accout.

As time goes on, Bounine becomes increasingly jealous of the fortune hunting Prince Paul ( who knew Anastasia from childhood) pays to Anya.

This is all brought to a head when Anya receives an audiende with the Grand Dowager Empree ( the Tsar's mother) who proclaims that the girl is the "real" Anastasia after which Anya elopes with Bounine without ever finding out about the money.

Wright and Forrest later reworked the show so thoroughly that we list the later version, which has gone by different titles at different times, as a separate show. Information on that version can be found here.

• I, Anastasia (revised version)