When the dancers are leaping, the accordions wheezing, the lights flashing, the skirts swirling, and the vodka flowing, then Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 feels thrillingly unlike anything else on Broadway. A chunk of War and Peace, adapted to a sung-through indie-folk-electro score by composer Dave Malloy and directed with breathless, breathtaking verve by Rachel Chavkin, this musical is a cannonball aimed at any show that has accepted proscenium staging as an unyielding norm rather than a conscious choice.
This piece, which began far off Broadway in 2012 and moved to a tent nearby in 2013, takes its plot from the second volume of War and Peace. Pierre (Josh Groban, in a collaborative and assured Broadway debut), the dissolute son of a nobleman, searches for meaning in the bottom of a bottle. Natasha (a sweet Denée Benton), the innocent daughter of a count, nearly throws herself away on Anatole (a roguish Lucas Steele), a hedonist and the brother of Pierre’s slatternly wife Hélène (a deliciously predatory Amber Gray). Eventually, their travails twine.
There are a half-dozen other major characters – and to keep them all straight, the playbill includes both a family tree and a detailed synopsis. It’s acknowledged knowingly when the actors sing in the opening prologue: “It’s a complicated Russian novel / Everyone’s got nine different names / So look it up in your program / We’d appreciate it, thanks a lot.”
Patronymics aside, the plot is actually fairly simple and the first act sometimes spins its troika wheels while it gets going. Fans of Groban may find themselves somewhat disappointed to discover that Pierre’s character is less significant than that of Natasha and that he spends much of the show slumping in the orchestra pit. However, they will not be disappointed by his voice, which is full and rich and wonderfully emotive. There’s an archness to the writing that’s not in keeping with Tolstoy and that sometimes thwarts emotional engagement. The combinatory musical style is perhaps too eclectic, yet also undeniably invigorating – like a shot of horseradish vodka.
Besides, these are rather minor quibbles when compared with the beauty of many of the songs (Sonya Alone, Pierre and Andrey) and the excitement of the immersive staging. Some recent pieces have attempted to make use of the whole of the auditorium, like the fight scene in Rocky or the actors who ran up and down the aisles, in the revival of Hair, and plenty of shows have seated audience members onstage, but none have gone as far as Great Comet in terms of uniting the playing space and the seats, both cheap and expensive.
The band is distributed throughout the theater and the chorus, accordions and guitars strapped to their costumes, think nothing of sprinting to the back of the balcony while delivering a song. The sight lines are probably best from the orchestra, but in the seats onstage, the actors rush back and forth with reckless speed, some performers inches away, while others are even closer. Mimi Lien’s sets, which fuse the Napoleonic era with the cold war one, Bradley King’s playful and exquisite lighting, and Paloma Young’s peasant-glam costumes add further excitement.
In the midst of a trying and often frightening seven days in America, a musical about affairs of the heart among the Russian nobility might have seemed unspeakably irrelevant. (It doesn’t even manage a Putin joke.) But being in that room among so much laughter and pluck and dash, with a warm dumpling thrust into the hand of each spectator, feels like being presented with the theatrical equivalent of a matryoshka doll – a gift to open repeatedly.
