Takarazuka Revue: Anna Karenina (Moon 2019)
a Takarazuka original based on Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina
This entry is going to be a pseudo-analysis for the staged musical in comparison with Tolstoy’s original. The book is well-known enough; it needs no further explanation. But for the musical lovers, a tldr would be — this is a story of infidelity, guilt, and inevitable downfall. Tolstoy likes to construct his stories in a straightforward manner. They have pretty simple plots, but the entanglement between the characters is where the complications fester, which would eventually develop into a full blown sepsis. (War and Peace is a notable exception; Tolstoy himself also think of it as a historical record rather than just a fiction. That’s a story for another time.)
The curtain draws and the lights turns on to the train platform. It is where Alexei caught eye of Anna, the wife of a budding politician Karenin. It was supposed to be a romantic encounter, but it may not be, because a depressed wife had thrown herself onto the tracks. But they don’t know. They never did, nor do they know it was faraway echo to their own fates. The rest was, not history, but a waltz, tragically beautiful, where Anna longs for love from her always-serious husband, and a passionate, young Alexei swirls into the elegant dance. They had various subtle exchanges, turning and tossing… until the night under the sheets, essentially the climax of the first part of the novel.
On this point, the tension between Anna and Alexei was done very well to put Tolstoy’s waltz-like writing on the first act of the stage. Although the railway scene’s great foreshadowing of the protagonists’ downfall, more explicitly Anna’s, were somehow left unillustrated. But anyway, for the lay audience, that doesn’t really matter, because at the end when Alexei leaves for his military post in Serbia, he was reading Anna’s diary aloud. So that was a kind of foreshadowing for them too I guess. But for the development towards the climax, I do think that the actresses did a great job in portraying the tug of war happening inside Anna. The morality and the little love left in her wanting to give her husband another chance — who caused that little spark to die out completely when he scoffed at her emotional needs — and then with the lust for Alexei. However the tension goes downhill thereafter. Anna’s birthing scene became a soap opera, and Alexei’s attempted suicide seemed unbased. That was because the backstories were not elaborated, perhaps lightly taken away by a few lines. In any case, the actress playing Anna still did really well in showing Anna’s depression and attachment for anyone who was willing to offer her love. At that point when she and Alexei finished their honeymoon in Italy, we learn that Anna has become addicted to morphine for sleep. And the more depressed Anna gets, it becomes clear that her ‘love’ was simply a need for attachments, not actual love, but resembling more to infatuation. That is why when Alexei went out to socialize her mental health just crashed.
Another part of the musical that was rather interesting was that the part with Konstantin Levin was omitted in a lot of parts. To be fair, after reading the book thrice over a few years, I still don’t really understand why that boring boring part exists except for a very humble brag about Levin’s love for nature and his very ‘staple’, moral love, vs the passionate and morally challenging love going on between Anna and Alexei. So that was just an idea of be left in the wild for thought. But for me, I think being staged the part can be removed entirely just to focus on the protagonists as the scenes with Levin seemed going nowhere.
There were a lot of analyses to Anna’s final scene (as part of a memory / mental visualization) as to why she picked such a gruesome and tragic way of suicide. I think of it on two levels: one, she saw Alexei commit suicide with a pistol and failed, so she knew that might not work that well when she really wants to die. Two, it was where she and Alexei first met, and where she and her (ex-) husband had a semi-reconciliation — it has a special meaning to her in the two most important relationships in her life. I have also read something interesting: that Anna was the most genuinely guilty of her immorality. In a typical tragedy, everyone dies. But in this story, only the title character died. Why?
To answer this we need to go further back into the story, and think of Anna’s characterization: she is in this dire need for love, for someone to be attached to, and for someone to give her the love she wants. And to do this she is willing to risk her honour. Compare this with Alexei: he is a count and is unmarried, so he has a lot of freedom and time is in his favour. Unfortunately Alexei turned out to be a pseudo-mama’s boy and picked his aristocratic social circles over Anna even though she was visibly upset. Note that even after the Italian honeymoon, Alexei could easily scramble his way back into the aristocracy, but Anna’s name was forever tainted. That is the inequality we are seeing, and this is why Anna feels guilty, or perhaps more more accurately, regret, about what she had done to be with an unreliable playboy. The act of throwing herself into the rails vaguely resembles a pilgrimage, perhaps like Jesus, though she was repenting for her own sins, moral and immoral, and a last begging for everlasting love.
References
- Jahn, G.R. (1981). The Image of the Railroad in Anna Karenina, Slavic and East European Journal, 25(2):1–10.
- Maninng, C.A. (1927) Tolstoy and Anna Karenina, PMLA, 42,(2):505–521.
Cite as: Bachmanov, G. (August 17, 2023). Takarazuka Revue: Anna Karenina (Moon 2019): a Takarazuka original based on Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Opera of the Day. https://operaoftheday.medium.com/takarazuka-revue-anna-karenina-moon-2019-ef0ad197f0ac
