Theatre in Review: Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 (Imperial Theatre)

Having made a long and arduous journey from the tiny Ars Nova Theater -- there was a stopover at a circus tent in the Meatpacking District -- Dave Malloy's Tolstoyan musical has landed on Broadway with a flourish and a confident grin. The set designer, Mimi Lien, expanding her original concept, has turned the Imperial into a cross between an opera house, a cabaret, and a grand salon in the Hermitage; it's a riot of red drapery, portraiture, and chandeliers formed like golden starbursts. (Adding to the effect: We enter the house through a lobby reimagined as a dreary, Soviet-era gunmetal structure, adorned with torn posters for Pussy Riot and other Russian pop stars.) The multilevel stage practically ascends to the heavens, with audience members sitting at cozy little tables surrounded by gilded railings and staircases leading to a door at the top of the stage wall, through which characters make theatrical entrances in search of romance, marriage, social position, or sex.

The show begins and, as if blown by a giant wind, the room is suddenly filled with maidens, drunkards, spinsters, soldiers, desiccated aristocrats, and handsome scoundrels, accompanied by a legion of musicians, clowns, and ladies of dubious virtue -- many of them toting guitars and violins. (The show's orchestra has been scattered to the four corners of the room, with Or Matias, the musical director, planted in a pit at stage center, surrounded by a passerelle.) In the delightful prologue, the entire cast, seemingly on a spree, introduces the crowded cast of principals and lays out their complicated interrelationships. We are seeing a musical based on a 19th-century Russian novel after all.

Well, in any case, a portion of a Russian novel. Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 dramatizes a single thread of War and Peace, following the innocent young Natasha, engaged to the perpetually absent soldier Andrey; without her husband-to-be on hand, she falls into the clutches of the ruthless seducer Anatole, who begs her to elope with him -- even though he is already married. Watching in dismay is Pierre, who, having inherited his uncle's estate, has drunk and whored himself into a deep depression. Repeatedly cuckolded by his loose-living spouse, Hélène, he has become a near-recluse, accompanied only by his books. But when he learns that Anatole -- his brother-in-law through Hélène -- intends to ruin Natasha, he is roused to action, leading to a life-changing epiphany.

Malloy's music draws on a variety of influences, including Russian folk music, indie rock, and, for a sequence depicting decadent Moscow club life, electronic dance music; much of it soars, even if the composer is inordinately dependent on recitative to push the narrative along. The director, Rachel Chavkin, marshals her company like a general deploying the troops -- sending them into the audience on a series of runways, erasing the image of a kiss with a blinding blast of light, staging an "opera" that turns into a nightmare vision of Andrey being murdered in war, and sending her performers here, there, and everywhere to dance with vodka-fueled abandon, as choreographed by Sam Pinkleton. In its original Off Broadway staging, the piece was marked by a deep intimacy; here, it has been blown up into a teeming spectacle, an evening of grand gestures.

And you can be sure that Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 is never, ever dull. There's always another romantic assignation or bloody duel or spangled performer ready to engage in an antic series of steps. Whether you will become genuinely involved in the affairs -- or care about the fates of Natasha, Pierre, and their friends, relatives, and lovers -- isn't so easy to predict. Aside from the gaudy, sometimes frantic staging, much of the evening's magnetism comes from its cast. Denée Benton, making her Broadway debut, is a package of pure radiance in white fur, her eyes ready to devour the whole of Moscow, her voice positively throbbing with great expectations. She grabs us with her first entrance, wins us over with her Act I aria, "No One Else," and vividly highlights the excitement and terror of a young aristocrat willing to throw away her reputation for a lover's embrace. Also making his Broadway bow, Josh Groban, as Pierre, keeps a farily low profile in the first act, although he stops the show cold with his frenzied aria, "Dust and Ashes," a confession of self-loathing following his participation in a duel, given extra heft by Malloy's almost atonal underscoring. Stuffed into a fat suit, bespectacled, with his hair blown in every direction, Groban is the most abject musical theatre hero imaginable. Yet he attains real stature in the second act, transforming himself into a man of action as Natasha's fate hangs in the balance. His voice mingles gloriously with Benton's in the duet "Pierre & Natasha" and he brings it all home in the final number, "The Great Comet of 1812," taking us, step by step, along Pierre's journey from nihilism to belief.

Among the large supporting cast, strong impressions are made by Brittain Ashford as Sonya, who looks on in agony as her dear cousin Natasha puts herself in the path of moral hazard (her Act II aria, "Sonya Alone," pretty much brings down the house); Amber Gray, who made a strong impression earlier in the season in Hadestown (also directed by Chavkin), as the contemptuous, man-crazy Hélène; Grace McLean, gifted with a voice of the purest metal as Marya D., Natasha's tough, unforgiving godmother; and Lucas Steele as Anatole, preening and deploying his blonde mop as a tool of seduction.

Still, as engaging as all the color, movement, and vocal pyrotechnics can be, there is something uncertain about the piece. Tolstoy wrote his novel out of the highest moral purpose, and the story of Natasha is a canny assessment of the dangers into which young women of the period could fall. Malloy -- who wrote the score and libretto -- sometimes can't decide whether he is celebrating this story, kidding it, or both. You can get bit of whiplash as one of Pierre's most stunning numbers, followed by a telling encounter between Natasha and Hélène, is wiped out by an overblown production number, heavy on the bass line, with a chorus of club kids dressed like they're at a rave. There's a we're-putting-on-a-show quality that sometimes charms and sometimes grates. Nicholas Belton, who plays Andrey, doubles as Bolkonksy, the doddering old estate-owner, making use of every grumpy-old-man gesture in the book; at the same time, we're expected to feel something for Mary, his plain, lonely daughter. But it's not easy to weep for a young woman who tends toward the cartoonish. There are also far too many jarring moments of joking around the audience. Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 is sometimes moving, sometimes electrifying, and sometimes just a bit vulgar and overreaching in its gritted-teeth determination to give the audience a good time.

Still, Paloma Young's costumes range from ravishing gowns to gorgeously detailed men's suits to wild hybrids of two different centuries. Bradley King's lighting draws the audience's attention to every corner of the theatre, occasionally surprising them with brilliant blinder cues. Nicholas Pope's sound design has the unenviable task of making each performer totally intelligible, no matter where he or she is -- often in front of the loudspeaker rig -- and, amazingly, he pulls it off.

There is talent to be found on every level and in every cranny of Lien's set; I only wish that Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 -- glittering edifice that it is -- was erected on more solid ground. As it is, it's prone to rather giddy mood shifts that sometimes undermine the story it is trying to tell. Make no mistake, however -- this is a wild, rollicking circus of a show. -- David Barbour