NATASHA, PIERRE AND THE GREAT COMET OF 1812
Music, lyrics and book by Dave Malloy
directed by Tim Sheader
Donmar Warehouse, London – until 8 February 2025
“Gonna have to study up a little bit / If you wanna keep with the plot / Cause it’s a complicated Russian novel” trills the ensemble at the top of this eccentric musical distillation of a seventy page tranche of Tolstoy’s War And Peace, receiving its long-awaited UK premiere seven years after closing on Broadway. Actually, Dave Malloy’s quirky, intoxicating fusion of punchy electropop and lush, full blown romanticism, structurally nearer to a cantata than a traditional musical, is certainly challenging but it’s seldom hard to follow.
It’s also rollicking good fun, not perhaps words one might expect to use when describing a Tolstoy adaptation, but here we are and here it is. Perhaps because Malloy is responsible for book, music and lyrics, there is a remarkable clarity of vision, fully realised in Tim Sheader’s modern dress staging which is equal parts grunge and glamour, so that however bizarre or random individual moments of this through-sung tuner are, there’s never a moment where you feel like anybody on, or connected to, the stage doesn’t know exactly what their brief is and how to fulfil it. It’s messy but my God it’s beautiful.
I suspect original director Rachel Chavkin (best known in the UK for helming Hadestown) was majorly instrumental in shaping Natasha, Pierre and The Great Comet of 1812 as a piece as it moved from its beginnings way off Broadway to its Main Stem run. It breaks so many musical theatre rules – the storytelling is more scattershot than linear, characters declaim and talk about themselves in the third person, the tone veers wildly from camp to sentimental to quietly contemplative – yet it is undeniably its own haunting, ingenious thing.
On Broadway they turned the appropriately named Imperial Theatre into a fully immersive rendering of Moscow old and new from the moment you entered the lobby, all without compromising the show’s essential “downtown” vibe. If that version maintained its shabby-chic credentials, Sheader and designers Leslie Travers (set) and Evie Gurney (costumes) reconceive 19th century Russia for the Donmar as something like present day Shoreditch and Hoxton. It works a treat: the aesthetic is hipsterish, a little dangerous, pretty queer and entirely compelling. Brutalist lettering hangs in the sky, lush red drapes transport us from drawing room to opera house, ne’er-do-wells disport on outsized moveable packing cases, a giant, stage-dominating illuminated ring rises and falls imprisoning then freeing inhabitants, snow falls, batteries of lights whirr galvanically or hypnotically. It’s sensory overload masquerading as theatre, and it’s irresistible.
Malloy takes Tolstoy’s sliver of a story about young Countess Natasha (a radiant Chumisa Dornford-May, fielding a voice of infinite range and colours, and given more agency then her New York predecessors) arriving in Moscow from the country to meet her betrothed who’s still away at war and falling under the spell of womanising dandy Anatole (Jamie Muscato, all tight trousers, smoky eye make up and confident screlting) and gives it several jolts of anachronistic electricity. Musically there are elements of folk, funk, atonal modern, straight classical…, and the lyrics are bright, witty and occasionally breathtaking in their open-hearted sincerity. I doubt there’s any modern musical theatre song more delicate and beautiful than ‘No One Else’, Natasha’s rapturous contemplation of youthful love, performed here atop a larger than life pink teddy bear. Surely there are few as down-and-dirty as conniving, corrupting Hélène’s funk-driven semi-seduction ‘Charming’ (“Now a woman with a dress / Is a frightening and powerful thing / You are not a child / You’re draped in scarlet and lace”) delivered with charismatic relish by a darkly magnetic Cat Simmons. The music never stops, creating a heady, lilting, sometimes sinister, often exhilarating tapestry of sound that doesn’t invite comparison with anything else in the musical theatre canon.
Simmons would be a show stealer if the rest of the company wasn’t so excellent. But Chloe Saracco’s icy but insecure princess, Cedric Neal’s hedonistic leather queen coachman, Daniel Krikler as Anatole’s sexy-as-hell assassin sidekick, Eugene McCoy as a grotesque elder dignitary and Annette McLaughlin’s Chanel-suited, martini dry socialite aunt all feel utterly indispensable and vivid. Then there’s Maimuna Memon as Sonya Rostova, Natasha’s staunch, smart cousin. It’s an unshowy role but Memon invests her with pin-sharp precision and makes something utterly devastating of her second act solo where Sonya resolves to stand by our wayward heroine. As unhappy, drunken Pierre, Declan Bennett delivers lovely, sensitive work and navigates the role’s rangy vocal demands superbly, although the constant references to the character’s physical size don’t make much sense.
Ultimately, Natasha, Pierre and The Great Comet of 1812 is that rare thing: a wildly imaginative and prodigiously talented work that is as smart as it’s original. It has antescendents in Brecht and Sondheim but even that as a description doesn’t quite prepare you for what this is. Sheader and team (also including Howard Hudson, responsible for the shapeshifting lighting and Ellen Kane whose unfettered choreography is frequently thrilling) make a very persuasive case for it as the most exciting American tuner of its generation. Musical theatre doesn’t get cooler or sexier than this. Magical.
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