Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 at the Donmar Warehouse review: exciting, audacious and infuriating I’d have loved to hear the elevator pitch for Dave Malloy’s massively audacious, massively pretentious musical riff on War and Peace.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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