Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812

[ivyfic]

D and I went to see Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 last night. This is a broadway play based on 10 pages in the middle of War and Peace. This is my experience of watching this musical:
This is interesting
OMG THIS IS AWESOME
THIS IS THE AWESOMEST THING
I am definitely buying the soundtrack if I can fight my way to the merch table
Still awesome
This has been going on for a long time
I wonder what time it is
I bet I'm not getting home til after midnight
I need to remember to pick up my computer from work, to finish reviewing that one thing
Is it still going on?
Oh. It's over.
Huh.

The musical has an arch distance to it. The prologue sets the tone:

This is in your program you are at the opera
Gonna have to study up a little bit if you wanna keep with the plot
Cuz 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

They then list each of the characters with a descriptor (Anatole is hot, Sonya is good, Natasha is young, etc), and each time they add a character, they run back through the rest, like a War and Peace Twelve Days of Christmas.

This is both hilarious and an accurate description of what it is like to read a Russian novel. And that's kind of the tone of the whole thing. It's not about immersing in the story, it's more recreating what it's like to read a Russian novel as a 21st century American—struggling to keep up with the plot, raising your eyebrows at the repeated mentions of a woman's bare arms, and wondering why we're spending so much time on a character that never shows up again. It turns the original melodrama into a gentle satire of itself.

The problem with this is the Moulin Rouge problem. You spend the first act being distanced from the characters and having your attention drawn to the ridiculousness of it all. So when the second act tries to lose some of that distance and draw real emotion from the situation…it doesn't work. We haven't spent enough time with any of these individuals to really care, and the time we spent was more looking at them than being with them.

This musical has gotten a lot of comparisons to Hamilton (the glowing NYTimes review asserts that it's better), and those comparisons make sense. Both are taking a historical setting and filtering it through modern aesthetics, though Hamilton is hip hop and R&B and Great Comet is punk, EDM, and Russian ballad. Both have a diverse cast. Both have structural problems. But ultimately, in Hamilton, you care a lot about the characters and the ending is a gut punch. I had to stand in the theater for a few minutes to just breathe it in before I felt I could go back out into the world again. Great Comet never even asks you to care about the characters, so as the second act disintegrates then ends with a whimper, there's no sense of completion or catharsis.

[warning, spoilers for the end] I feel like Dave Malloy cheated himself out of a solid story by constraining himself too much to the source material. It's like the musical is a result of a bar bet—that he could make a whole musical out of 10 pages of War and Peace. But as this is a random middle section, it doesn't really have an end. So when the end comes, the only reason the audience knows it's the end is because it's the title of the play. So when Natasha and Pierre talk to each other for the very first time in the entire thing, and then the great comet shows up, I pretty much knew that it was the end. But if it hadn't been the title, I would have been completely surprised that it stopped there. If you had to use the title of your work to add weight to your ending because otherwise your audience wouldn't know it was the ending, I feel like you've failed somehow.

All that said, this is a fantastic musical and I had a great time. I'm very glad I got tickets (it was touch and go with TKTS—the app kept showing there were tickets available, then saying there weren't, then saying there were until I went to the booth to see), especially as this is the last weekend with Okieriete Onaodowan as Pierre.

It has some of the best stage craft I've ever seen, the lighting and sound are all perfect, the costumes are great (and costumes and sound won Tonys), the music is excellent (though not exactly catchy), and all the performances are top notch.

I have to call out my two favorite moments: "The Private and Intimate Life of the House," in which a crotchety senile old man rants and raves as his daughter scurries about trying to care for him—which doesn't sound funny from that description, but dear god it is. And "The Opera," in which the characters go to an opera which we are shown in flashes—the lights come up to a swell of avant garde music and incomprehensible gargling noises from the singers, then go to complete darkness to show another flash, now with acrobats doing something obscure, then another flash, until the lights come back up on the characters, their jaws dropped, with the perfect facial expressions of WTF WAS THAT. Yes, this is my impression of Russian opera. I was DYING.

I would rate Great Comet above most of the Broadway musicals I've seen in the last few years: better than traditional musicals like Kinky Boots and Something Rotten, way better than Waitress and Miss Saigon. And it's a total bummer that it's closing, especially as it is dying of self inflicted wounds.

If you have a chance to see it in the next few weeks, definitely try to do so, though since it's announced it's closing, tickets have been scarce. If not, well, at least there's a cast recording. This more than most things I've seen I really wish others of my friends saw (especially you, jethrien), so it's especially a bummer that it's closing.



As an aside, I was really amused that the merch table did not sell War and Peace. They instead sold Give War and Peace a Chance, a 300-page book about War and Peace. And you know, if I'm not up for reading War and Peace, I'm definitely not up for reading 300 pages about why I should. The lady at the merch table said that it was really popular, though, so oh well.

Comments

[jethrien]

Oh, damn. I would have liked to have seen that. I've actually even read War and Peace.

[ivyfic]

Yeah, I thought of you a lot. But we can't see everything, though I try. They actually start the play with the chorus going into the audience and asking anyone if they've read War and Peace. There was one yes in my section.

[ivyfic]

If you want the soundtrack, I've got it.

[yourlibrarian]

This is both hilarious and an accurate description of what it is like to read a Russian novel. And that's kind of the tone of the whole thing. It's not about immersing in the story, it's more recreating what it's like to read a Russian novel as a 21st century American—struggling to keep up with the plot, raising your eyebrows at the repeated mentions of a woman's bare arms, and wondering why we're spending so much time on a character that never shows up again. It turns the original melodrama into a gentle satire of itself.

Your review is the first that really explained to me why this was popular as well as why people were divided on it.