In a new London production of Dave Malloy’s Tolstoy-inspired pop opera, “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812,” the stage is featureless but for six huge, light-up letters that spell out the show’s setting: Moscow. One of the O’s hangs overhead, and the W is facing backward with its wiring exposed — an apt metaphor for a piece that makes a comic virtue of showing its workings.
The show kicks off with an ironically condescending synopsis (“It’s a complicated Russian novel / Everyone’s got nine different names”) and proceeds in an intermittently arch mode, with performers even singing their own stage directions at some points.
This disarmingly whimsical storytelling style endeared “The Great Comet” to U.S. audiences when it was first performed in 2012; a 2016 Broadway production, directed by Rachel Chavkin, earned 12 Tony nominations before fizzling out ignominiously amid a casting controversy. This London revival, directed by Tim Sheader and running at the Donmar Warehouse through Feb. 8, 2025, is rendered in an offbeat, neon grunge aesthetic and wreaks playful havoc on our expectations — with mixed results.
The plot, borrowed from a 70-page segment of “War and Peace,” comprises two intertwined narratives — of coming-of-age melodrama and midlife ennui — in a 19th-century Russian aristocratic milieu.
Young, naïve Natasha (Chumisa Dornford-May), whose fiancé is away at war, becomes infatuated with a scoundrel called Anatole (Jamie Muscato), with predictably disastrous consequences. Meanwhile, middle-aged Pierre (Declan Bennett), a dissipated alcoholic stuck in a loveless marriage with an unfaithful wife, frets at length about his wasted life before eventually confessing his undying love for Natasha. Along the way we have a duel, a vodka binge and an opera-within-a-play.
The production’s visual landscape makes few concessions to realism. A couple of dresses nod vaguely to period style, but the ensemble is mostly in burlesque contemporary attire: The men are in leather pants, the women in fishnets; a couple of kilts and a giant fur coat are thrown in for good measure.
In a similar vein, Malloy’s musical score is almost anonymously eclectic — wistful ballads, stomping pop, a smattering of EDM — but threaded through with enough strains of Russian folk and klezmer to suggest a sense of place. The lighting alternates between neon monochrome and lurid multicolor, and there’s a constant sense of movement: A character drops down from a raised platform, firefighter-style; another is wheeled onstage, recumbent on a cart. (The costumes are by Evie Gurney, the lighting by Howard Hudson.)
Dornford-May is a convincing ingénue, by turns goofily girlish and stubbornly credulous. In his spectacles and leather jacket, Bennett’s Pierre comes across like a beleaguered sociology lecturer: kind, but somewhat lost. Muscato’s Anatole, in heavy eyeliner and open-neck shirt, looks and moves like the frontman of a 1980s indie band — an impression reinforced by his Morrissey-esque crooning.
Some of the casting is provocatively counterintuitive. Eugene McCoy as Natasha’s would-be father-in-law, Prince Bolkonsky, who is described as “old and feeble” in the songbook, is a positively sprightly figure, zipping around the stage with clownish abandon in silk pajamas and an orange bathrobe. And Chloe Saracco, who plays Bolkonsky’s “plain” daughter, Mary, is not plain at all.
Though Malloy’s lyrics sparkle sporadically — there’s a good deal of soliloquizing, stocktaking and introspection, but not a whole lot of wit — he has done an effective job of compressing Tolstoy’s story into an easily digestible form, and the show’s elegantly simple narrative arc lends itself to musical theater.
It begins in a spirit of bleak cynicism encapsulated by the sardonic refrain of “The Duel”: “Here’s to the health of married women — and their lovers.” By the closing scenes, that has given way to moral redemption as Pierre, moved to an epiphany by Natasha’s plight, resolves to have another stab at life.
This coincides with the appearance of the titular comet — represented by the aforementioned overhead O, which now descends toward the stage and surrounds Pierre, embracing him in its warmth. He ponders “This vast firmament / Open to my eyes / Wet with tears,” while holding up a lightbulb to indicate that he has seen the light.
The heavy-handed symbolism of this last image sits a little uneasily with the semisatirical mode in which the story has been rendered. Though agreeably entertaining, “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812” has a register problem: The show’s tone of tongue-in-cheek pastiche and its antirealist staging work against its emotional purchase, so that, despite the performers’ best efforts, the audience is never truly swept away in the characters’ travails. They function merely as signifiers — reminding us of other travails, in other plays and novels. We acknowledge feeling, but strictly in a wry, knowing way. There will be no tears tonight.
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