“She vividly does during this hallucination on the final night of her life”

“Like Hair or Swados’s own Tony-nominated musical, Runaways, The Beautiful Lady is most interested in capturing a specific time and place (in this case, St. Petersburg’s Stray Dog Café) by introducing us to the people who frequented it: There’s Alexander Blok (George Abud), a poet who wrote 800 love poems to ‘The Beautiful Lady’ (a secret identity much-claimed by the city’s prostitutes). Sergei Yesenin (Andrew Polec) is a country-bred Casanova who married four times before age 30. Poet-essayist Osip Mandelstam (Henry Stram), the long-suffering Marina Tsvetaeva (Ashley Pérez Flanagan), and futurist Velimir Khlebnikov (Tom Nelis) are all regulars at the Stray Dog. So is Vladimir Mayakovsky (Djoré Nance), whose cheerleading of the Bolshevik Revolution doesn’t save him. It is up to the only survivor of the bunch, Anna Akhmatova (Kate Fuglei), to remember — and she vividly does during this hallucination on the final night of her life.”

-Zachary Stewart