I’d have loved to hear the elevator pitch for Dave Malloy’s massively audacious, massively pretentious musical riff on War and Peace. It covers only 70 of Tolstoy’s 1,400-odd pages, so we have to explain all the characters, Moscow society and the Napoleonic war stuff at the start, okay?.
The music is a bit opera, a bit pop, a bit techno, but there’s also a lengthy four-finger piano motif and the Jaws theme in there. We’ll get great singers and sometimes build an overwhelming wall of sound but the lyrics will be through-sung recitative, with lots of exposition and dialogue that rarely rhymes and never scans. Oh, and everyone’s dressed as if they’re off to a Berlin underground club in the Nineties.
This is the first show new Donmar boss Timothy Sheader has ever directed here, and I spent half of its brisk 140-minute runtime applauding the brio with which he’s chosen to make his mark, and the other half smacking my forehead about how mad the whole thing is.
Natasha, Pierre blah blah blah got 14 Tony nominations on Broadway in 2017, but I’m not sure London loves showboating from creators or performers (there’s a lot of eyes-aloft, head-back emoting here) as much as New York. It only won for scenic and lighting design by the way.
Malloy does the music, lyrics, book and orchestrations, and concentrates on two plot strands. Young countess Natasha (sparkling Chumisa Dornford-May) is seduced away from her absent soldier fiancé by the roguish Anatole (Jamie Muscato, a mix of Hugh Grant and Rik Mayall).
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