Musical brings love, lust, fulfilment
Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812, by Dave Malloy. Directors: Maya Handa Naff and Nick Lerew. Musical Director: Hayden Taylor. Produced by Witch Music Theatre, Hannah Playhouse, until May 4.
You could call it a war of the heart. Witch Theatre’s latest production – Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 – is a musical based on an excerpt from Tolstoy’s War and Peace. The subject matter is, notionally, the more peaceful part: the intrigues of upper-class Moscow life, far from the military front. But battles – for love, lust and fulfilment – are still in plentiful supply.
The action takes place on a gleaming and luxurious set that projects well into the Hannah Playhouse auditorium. A lustrous two-tier black and grey oblong stage, containing a sunken piano pit, is backed by a classical archway, and lit with chandeliers.
This sharp, pick ‘n’ mix aesthetic is underlined by the brilliant costuming of the largeish cast of mostly young actors who occupy this louche milieu. Leather vies with leotards, ball gowns with big boots. The music, meanwhile, ranges gaily across Russian folk to electropop, and everything in between.
This deliberate eccentricity is, however, in studied contrast to the action itself, which has the stylised conventionality of its Tolstoyan source. Beautiful young Natasha, newly arrived in Moscow and betrothed to Andrey, falls for the dashing and dangerous Anatole. Bumbling, ill-fitting Pierre, meanwhile, searches for love and meaning in an immoral universe. Eventually their paths intersect.
The two leads are very good: Lane Corby is utterly believable as the girlish and naïve Natasha, her voice pure and unaffected, while William Duignan’s Pierre cuts a convincingly halting and frustrated figure. Each has at least one especially fine solo: No One Else for her, Dust and Ashes for him.
Henry Ashby, as Anatole, has a New Romantic charm but is a touch too nice, lacking the edge of menace and the room-filling charisma of the true seducer. An irritating libretto, meanwhile, forces the characters to constantly narrate their own actions (“I leave the room smiling”, etc.), in a perhaps ill-advised nod to Tolstoy’s omniscient narrator.
But the production has high points aplenty: anarchic Russian dancing, a black-and-white cabaret scene complete with Klaus Nomi tribute, and even an aerialist. Songs like Charming have a roguish, R&B-style swagger, while the ensemble number Letters is a grimy delight.
The ensemble singing more generally is tight, beautifully blended and atmospheric, while Hayden Taylor performs miracles as a simultaneous pit pianist and conductor.
Assuming some preview-night technical hitches are fixed, notably the over-miking of the musicians, this is well worth your time: a weirdly inventive show matched with a production full of youthful, kaleidoscopic energy.