After a decade of anticipation, Rachel Chavkin’s much talked-about musical arrives in London. Sparkling and strange, Dave Malloy’s EDM-fuelled rock opera is a thing to marvel at – and keen observers have been waiting for it to blaze across London’s dark skies for quite some time. Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 began life in a small New York non-profit theatre a decade ago, staged as a wild immersive party by Rachel Chavkin. Then it soared to Broadway, winning a fan base that was devastated by its premature closure. Now, it’s lighting up Donmar Theatre, in an intimate reimagining that lays bare its heart – but also its flaws.
Lightbulbs flicker in front of each seat in the audience, as the cast open with a prologue that’s a musical word-of-warning: “read the programme”, they chant while introducing characters from part eight of Tolstoy’s famously mammoth novel War and Peace with the simplicity of kids singing round a campfire. Such a warning isn’t necessary. It’s marvellously clear in the hands of new Donmar artistic director Timothy Sheader, who previously spent 17 years turning Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre into a musical theatre powerhouse.
If you’re vainly searching your memory for an inkling of Tolstoy’s story, here goes: famed for her beauty, the titular Natasha (Chumisa Dornford-May) and her friend Sonya (Maimuna Memon) arrive in Moscow for a dose of cultural sophistication while they wait for their husbands-to-be to return from the war. Depressed, cuckolded Pierre (Declan Bennett) keeps an eye on them, but he can’t protect Natasha from his ne’er-do-well brother Anatole (Jamie Muscato), who bombards her with attention and drags her into Moscow’s sordid, adulterous underbelly.
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