Hash Romanov

Anya. Ornithomimm was no theatergoer, but he would have grasped the principle of this musical perfectly--since he was a dinosaur who lived on other dinosaurs' eggs. Anya raids the nests of My Fair Lady, Cinderella, Rachmaninoff, turn-of-the-century operettas, a straight play called Anastasia and a movie called Anastasia. No matter how soon it closes, the show will not die young.

Anya (Constance Towers) is an attractive girl who has just finished a wet run on suicide by diving into a canal, and is drying out in a Berlin nut house, in 1925. In two words, her vocabulary is "Anastasia Romanov." Who should hear about her but Bounine the taxi driver? Well, part-time taxi driver. General Bounine (Michael Kermoyan) is one of those loyal servants of the Czar of All the Russias, without whom the czardom could scarcely have fallen. Bounine does not believe that the girl escaped the Bolshevik firing squad at Ekaterinburg, but he plays Professor Higgins to her Eliza Doolittle and coaches her to bluff big. After all, -L-400,000 is waiting in the Bank of England for the rightful Romanov heir. Some blind Russian peasants who happen to be milling around the streets of Berlin oblige by blubbering "Little Mother" all over the set, and it is clear that only an optometrist could prevent Prince Paul (John Michael King) and the Dowager Empress (Lillian Gish) from falling all over their royal relative.

There is no royalty in this for Rachmaninoff, who supplies all the music. If he had only written the lyrics as well, he might have spared himself lines like "Dust the bust of Dostoevsky." And if anyone guessed that there would not be a dance number called Vodka, Vodka! --all knee bends and flying boots--he guessed wrong.

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