“Ladies and gentlemen, obey the rules. Otherwise, you will face God’s judgment.”

On a railway station platform where white snowflakes scatter, a solemn voice resounds between cold steel structures as the drama begins. The moment the house falls into darkness, the audience is instantly drawn into the chill of 19th-century Russian aristocratic society.

The musical <Anna Karenina> is based on Tolstoy’s novel of the same name, which delves deeply into love, marriage, and family against the backdrop of late 19th-century Russian high society. Placing humanity’s universal struggles with love and happiness, choice and conflict atop graceful music and sensory stagecraft, the work thrusts the audience into the very heart of a whirlpool of blazing emotion.

Anna is the wife of high-ranking government official Karenin and a central figure in St. Petersburg society. One day, she boards a train to Moscow to settle her brother Stiva’s family troubles, and there she meets the young officer Vronsky and falls into a fatal love. Torn to shreds between a stable marriage and social standing, and above all her beloved son, Anna ultimately chooses her relationship with Vronsky. The cold gazes and moral censure of Russia’s upper class surrounding her grow ever fiercer, and feelings that were once love become entangled at some point with obsession, fear, and anxiety. In the end, Anna throws herself in front of a locomotive on a station platform, meeting a tragic end.

After its 2018 premiere and 2019 revival, <Anna Karenina> returns after about seven years, offering a chance to fully encounter the aesthetics of Russian musicals, which may feel somewhat unfamiliar to us. Russia’s unique artistic sensibilitynurtured by classical ballet, classical music, and literaturepermeates the work throughout. In particular, the stage, cold yet dramatic as if Russia’s long winter had been lifted whole, firmly grips the eye.

This season, the mise-en-scne of the original Russian production has been expanded to suit the scale of the Sejong Center Grand Theater. Four LED tower structures move freely, elegantly unfolding the story’s key settingsfrom the railway station and the ballroom to the skating rink and the racetrack, high-society salons, Anna’s mansion, and even a golden-hued rural landscape.

The stage design also functions as a device that visualizes the characters’ psychological states. In particular, the train is a vast metaphor symbolizing Anna’s fate. The way the early romantic platform with drifting snowflakes and the warm lighting of the carriage gradually transform in the latter half into a space of black iron, monumental gears, and thunderous noise that seems to smell of coal lays bare Anna’s inner self as she hurtles toward ruin. Under the station’s headlamps, the audience becomes a witness to a human life slowly derailing.

Numbers that carry the characters’ delicate psychological shifts and emotions on the distinctively impassioned melodies of Russia arrive with a texture different from Broadway or Western European musical numbers. There is also an impression close to a ‘sung-through’ piece, with the boundary between dialogue and song blurred. In melodies as rich and intense as tossing back one shot of vodka after another, even the ballads drive the audience hard to the very end without letting up.

Above all, what is most striking is the narrative written with Anna’s body. This season’s Anna is played by Ock Joo-hyun, Kim So-hyang, and Lee Ji-hye. All three lead from the front in roles that demand high-intensity emotion and vocal performance. Over a 150-minute running time, Anna writes with her body the rapture of Act 1 and the collapse of Act 2. Within numbers that ceaselessly traverse high notes and legato, the actors endure the weight of tragedy not through sheer volume but by tightly weaving breath and the grain of emotion.

Especially in the latter half, the scene in which Anna listens to the aria of the singer ‘Patti’ at the opera house as she advances toward her final choice deserves to be remembered as the climax that pierces the entire work. In the very center of the opera theater, Patti’s song “O My Beloved,” swelling warmly yet rapturously as if to embrace Anna who has lost everything, drives Anna’s pain and lonelinessabandoned somewhere on the border between ecstasy and despairdeep into the audience’s hearts.

Despite the not-short running time, it remains a pity that Anna’s emotional arc as she falls in love with Vronsky develops somewhat hastily on stage. For audiences who first meet Anna through the musical rather than the original novel, it may not be fully convincing why nna stakes everything on this love, or at what point her inner fissures race irreversibly toward catastrophe.

Even so, the work poses essential questions about life and love. As a woman who boldly steps outside social norms plummets, the audience leaves their seats reflecting on the happiness a person sought to reach and the tragic end. The story that began at a snow-filled railway station lingers on the platform of the heart for a while after the curtain falls. It runs at the Sejong Center Grand Theater through March 29.