That Time I was a [Dead] Russian Princess

“Ahem!” I stood, elevated, on a curb in my grade school’s parking lot during recess. I had gone around to all of my friends and handed them notes to meet me there for “official news.” I mimicked dramatic fanfare music with my voice, as I ascended the concrete slab. I was only standing four inches higher than they were, but in my mind, it was a balcony, and I was about to address the masses. “I have recently made a very important discovery,” I started, with as much gravitas as a nine-year-old can muster. “I have recently realized that I am actually the Grand Duchess Anastasia Romanov. There was a mix-up at the hospital when I was born, and I’m actually royalty.”

I paused for affect. This was going a little differently than I imagined. Somehow, I had pictured them immediately bowing in my presence, when I revealed my true identity, but that wasn’t happening. “Ahem!” I straightened up. “I want to thank each and every one of you, for helping me realize this about myself. And in reward for your service, I am granting you special jobs in my offices and armies.” I started going down the line, “You are my advisor!” “You are my general!” “You are a lesser member of the royal family, but you’re close.” That last friend was happy with this news, “Cool!” I continued: “There are, of course, opportunities for promotion depending on loyalty and good deeds.” They rolled their eyes. “Then of course, there is the matter of how you should act in the presence of royalty.” As an American, I had no idea how people act in front of royalty other than what I had seen in the movies. Here it went: “You will refer to me as ‘Your Imperial Highness’ and you must bow!”

We had all seen the animated musical film Anastasia that had just been released that fall in 1997. It was made by one of Disney’s rival studios to compete with the musical films of the “Disney Renaissance”, which had been so popular in the 1990s. The film dramatizes the long-standing myth that one of the Romanov royal family in Russia escaped execution at the hands of the communist Bolsheviks and turned up again, years later, and was reunited with her grandmother. As a kid’s movie, the film took some artistic liberties with Russian history, and I was taking some artistic liberties with the plot of the film for my dramatic announcement.

A week before, I had a dream, where I was the Grand Duchess Anastasia. I was euphoric when I woke up. In the dream, everyone treated me with respect. In the dream, all the girls who were mean to me, in my grade, immediately bowed down and apologized forever saying anything nasty – and benevolent monarch that I am, in my subconscious wavelength, I forgave them. Clearly, the only way for this to happen in real life was to be Anastasia. I knew that I wasn’t her – I mean, even as a nine-year-old I understood a historical timeline, and knew that I would have had to be about ninety years old to be the real Anastasia… but the kids at school weren’t as good at social studies as I was. All I needed to do was convince them that I was Anastasia – just like the main character in the movie. I was going to play the part, get my friends to play along, and one-step, two-step, BAM! All the mean girls would be bowing down to me in no time, and calling me “Your Imperial Highness.” That’s right!

So, I started doing research: nine-year-old-style. I got a plastic briefcase and filled it up with everything that I needed to convince everyone I was a thought-to-be-dead princess. I had a scarf. I had perfume. I had a Kids Discover Magazine on royals, one on knights and castles, and anything I could find. I called it my “princess kit” and I drew a picture of Anastasia on the front of it. For a week, I plotted this grand reveal moment for recess, and I was concerned when they were not bowing. If my friends didn’t bow, how would I get my enemies to bow and apologize for being mean? I continued to emphasize royal protocol: “It’s very important that you bow.”

“Whatever,” one said, and the three of them dispersed.

Here, I thought they would be honored that I had given them such high positions in my royal court. I mean, I could have made them peasants, like when we re-enacted the movie Titanic, one Friday night, and I made my little brother be a third-class passenger. My friends and I stood at the top of the stairs wearing my mom’s old 80s dresses, with the puffy sleeves, and some fake pearls, while my five-year-old brother, wearing my grandfather’s newsboy cap, tried to climb the stairs, to escape the imaginary water, while we threw things at him, and fired foam darts at him. To be clear, my friends and my brother and I were not allowed to watch Titanic, because there was a naked lady in the movie, but it was the biggest movie in the country – maybe the world that year. The trailer was played on TV constantly, and from what we could gather, putting the pieces together: the movie was about third-class people tried to go up the stairs and there was a guy with a gun, who shot at them. All things considered, I assumed my friends would have liked to be royal advisors, to the Russian princess, in my little Anastasia game.

They were changing. I had a very big imagination, and would love to get lost in these fantasy games, especially if I got to be a leader. My mom said I was a natural-born leader; others said I was “bossy,” maybe even, sometimes, mean. My friends were much more interested in other kinds of pop culture like boybands and the Spice Girls. I would get into these things, myself, a few years later, but I would much rather orchestrate elaborate make-believe scenarios than sit around and listen to music. After all, I figured, a princess wouldn’t listen to those things.

“What would Anastasia listen to?” I asked my parents, who were used to my make-believe binges, at this point, - and very proud that their daughter was all-of-a-sudden interested in a historical topic like the Romanovs. “Probably Tchaikovsky,” says my dad, “He was Russian.” We listen to the Tchaikovsky cassette in the car on the way to school. I really liked it, especially the “1812 Overture.” It was so grand. I could clearly imagine the confrontation between Napoleon’s troops and the Russian forces. I liked the canons at the end. Over the years, the “Disney Renaissance” and the animated princess craze prompted many thinkers from fields like cultural studies to psychology to write volumes on the harmful nature of “princess culture” for little girls: arguing that it dumbs us down or makes us passive. They obviously never met me in forth grade, reading every library book on Russian history and listening to canonical composers. I was neither dumb, nor passive, and this – I soon learned – would be a big problem for me.

“We have to listen to Tchaikovsky!” I tell my friends. They were familiar with his work, since one of them took ballet and danced to the Nutcracker, and another played piano. “This is the music for our royal court,” I declared. They went along with it for a little while, until I started bashing other kinds of music. “But we like the Spice Girls,” they said. “That’s peasant music. If you listen to it, the guards will take you away,” I countered. I was on a power trip. The game got old very quickly for my poor friends, who had to deal with my royal episodes. “Anastasia’s dead! You’re not really Anastasia, you know!” one protested. “Only a crazy person would think they’re the real Anastasia!” I didn’t think I was, but maybe at this point, I had been taking the game a little too seriously, I thought.

As part of my “research,” I asked my parents to rent all the movies about Anastasia from Blockbuster, including the 1956 film with Ingrid Bergman and Yul Brynner. Much like the animated film version, it was about the scheme to convince the dowager Empress that an ordinary woman was, indeed, her long-lost-granddaughter, the princess Anastasia. The ploy is successful, and the grandmother says to the imposter, “I thought you were gone, but you have come back, Anastasia. You have come back! But, oh, please, if it should not be you, don't ever tell me.” The screenwriter, Arthur Laurents, who is better known for writing Broadway librettos like West Side Story and Gypsy, understood the same thing I was learning at age nine: that sometimes a fantasy world is so wonderful compared to the real world, that you don’t ever want to leave. I loved living in my world of grand music and high station, where a sad little girl could have power and respect. It was a far cry from the life of the real Anastasia Romanov, whose life was full of tragedy, and was cut too short by flames of insurrection and hatred. You can be a princess, but that doesn’t mean that respect and love will follow you. Sometimes, princesses get overthrown – and that seemed to be the case with me and my friends.

My friends stopped wanting to hang out with me. My parents figured that I should be around other kids who had imaginations as big as mine, so they enrolled me in a local acting class, run by the township in an old one-room school building. I realized I was in the right place and decided that I could have a career in theatre. Years later, I did just that.

In fact, I did pretty well. Twenty years after my Anastasia-phase, I was directing my first Off-Broadway production, Dorian Gray the Musical. I had made many friends in my Master’s Program in Theatre at Villanova University. One of them, Chris Dayett wrote the piece as his graduate thesis, and I directed the first reading. I was very grateful when he asked me to direct the piece for the New York Musical Festival, at the Acorn Theatre at Theatre Row. It was an incredibly rigorous process, and when the show finally went up, we sold out every performance. A couple members of the cast and I decided to celebrate by eating dinner at Sardi’s and going to see a Broadway show. By 2017, Anastasia had been turned into a Broadway musical. Our original plan was to go see Bette Midler in Hello Dolly, but it was sold out. We decided to see Anastasia instead.

I was apprehensive to see it, this animated film had meant a lot to me, and the memories were bitter-sweet. On the one hand, I had been empowered by it, and it ended up setting me on the path that led me to Off-Broadway. On the other hand, it reminded me of a painful time, when I lost friends out of a misguided plot to be worshipped on the schoolyard. Internally, I was still embarrassed by how far I had gone with the game.

My trepidation towards Anastasia became the least of my worries as my friends and I sat down to dinner at Sardi’s and the reviews for our show, Dorian Gray, started appearing online. A couple years ago, New York City theatres started doing this thing called Show Score: it was a website where anyone who saw the show could log in and say whatever they wanted about it – and yes, just as you imagine, it attracts the most vile amateur critics, who can easily hide behind their phone screens and spout the most vicious, self-satisfied bile. I might as well have been nine years old again and dealing with the schoolyard bullies. “Mandracchia’s direction is pedestrian and misguided” and “This was the worst directed staged reading I ever seen at the festival… Grossly misdirected… I don't know how the festival is charging to see this… I love the festival, I look forward to it each year...but productions like Dorian Gray I fear the festival has taken a giant step down and should this continue its reputation will be shot and the festival gone.” Ouch. My friends who were at the table with me, who had been actors in the show got grilled as well, “Where do they find such singers? It's way under high-school level - embarrassing.” Double ouch. One review was so bad, we actually reported it for online harassment and the website took it down. I don’t remember exactly what it said, but I’m pretty sure “Christen Mandracchia should never direct again,” was in there somewhere. Suddenly I felt like I was back in fourth grade, dealing with the “mean girls.” The amateur critics did to my show what the Bolsheviks did to the Romanovs.

We left the restaurant with our heads a lot lower than when we went in, and slowly made our way to the theatre for Anastasia. Deep down I was hoping that I could gain the same power from this story that I did all those years ago. I thoroughly enjoyed the production, but I didn’t feel the same way about the story as I had twenty years before, and that’s natural. After all, forensic science proved that Anastasia had been killed with the rest of her family a hundred years prior. The magic was gone. Literally, they had re-worked the story for the stage and they took out all magical elements that had been in the film and strived for more realism. My first instinct was to be snarky about my distaste for their artistic choices, but I could not bring myself to say anything bad about the show after what I had just experienced at the dinner table, reading Show Score. I was standing in line for the ladies room during intermission and I had a moment of – what seemed like – divine revelation.

“O my God,” I said to myself in the bathroom stall – as if having a vision from on-high.

When I was nine, I dealt with my negative feelings by turning myself into the worst kind of critic. I wanted to be respected so I turned myself into judge, jury, and executioner. “You must bow, or I will put you in the dungeon!” “Everything that isn’t to my cultural taste is peasant culture!” It didn’t go well for me, because treating people like they are beneath you, just to make yourself feel better, just alienates people and justifies their contempt for you. Perhaps that’s what all those wannabe theatre critics on Show Score were trying to do: make themselves feel better about themselves by treating me like a peasant. Maybe they wished they could be an Off-Broadway director or actor, and compensated for it by being overly critical of other people’s work. Maybe they were sad and lonely. They didn’t seem to care about all of the work and sacrifices we put into our show – they just wanted to get a clever jab in: the meaner, the better. I felt sorry for them. Maybe, like me, they thought they were “punching up”, but they were really “punching down” the whole time.

It would have been easy for me to say mean things about certain aspects of Anastasia on Broadway. Too easy – but I thought about all of the work that must have gone into it. Hours of labor and thought to make people happy. I could critique some of their choices, but in that moment, the spell was broken. I had no desire to be snarky or judgmental. I was not a princess. I was a fellow artist, who appreciates the need invite other people into a convincing fantasy, as long as we know to make it a good place for all participants.

As for the musical I directed, by the end of the Festival, we were voted “Best of Fest” in our category. Deliciously, this award was sponsored by Show Score, and votes poured in from people who liked the show, far outnumbering the harsh critics by the hundreds. As the playwright, myself, and one of our actors ascended the platform to accept our award, I was on my royal balcony again – but this time, my friends were standing with me, and not four inches beneath me.