Dave Malloy’s Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 proved a great success in its 2023 Canadian premiere, a co-production between Crow’s Theatre and the Musical Stage Company. Extending for months, director Chris Abraham’s immersive, intimate production of a small piece of Tolstoy’s War and Peace was infused with a party atmosphere and triumphed at the Toronto Theatre Critics’ Awards and Dora Awards.
When Mirvish picked up the show as part of its subscription season, my only question was whether a remount at the larger Royal Alexandra Theatre would be capable of replicating the original engagement’s festive lightning in a bottle.
Well, fear not; the upscaled edition is slightly different, but it’s still a rave in multiple ways, with lived-in performances making it seem at times even more immediate than at Crow’s. The show still feels more like a vibe than anything cohesive, but what a vibe it is.
To recap: There’s a war on, and young Natasha (Hailey Gillis) and her cousin Sonya (Vanessa Sears) are visiting sweetly stern aunt Marya (Louise Pitre) in Moscow, while Natasha waits for her betrothed Andrey (Marcus Nance) to return from combat.
Far from the war, the titular characters fight a more personal battle. Socially awkward Pierre (Evan Buliung) is full of drink and self-loathing at home while his contemporaries fight afield, and his bored wife Hélène (Divine Brown) decides to stir up drama with coddled Natasha, who for the first time contends with rejection. Spurned by her prospective in-laws (Nance also plays Andrey’s mercurial father, with a winsomely bitter Heeyun Park 박희윤 as Andrey’s sister), she’s easy prey for the attentions of Hélène’s brother, handsome scoundrel Anatole (George Krissa). Malloy sets it all to an eclectic score, R&B licks and Russian folk music vying with hot techno beats.
The cast has found new depths of character in the intervening 18 months. Nance ably contrasts the antic falsetto ravings of Andrey’s elderly father with the stoic basso rumblings of Natasha’s fiancé, while giving both identically malicious smiles. Krissa turns Anatole’s self-aware caddish charm up to 11, flirting with the onstage audience, the front row, and somehow even the balcony.
Gillis fully embraces the humour inherent in Natasha’s sheltered naivete without making her a caricature, fluttering about in moments of uncertainty and blithely concluding that her sudden infatuation couldn’t have occurred without the purest of connections. Yet her Natasha is now also more sympathetic throughout, Gillis underlying those funny moments with a desperation to believe her own words.
Buliung sharply defines Pierre’s simmering torment, giving his character a clearer arc toward his later Sondheimian explosions of self-discovery. For all the raucous party numbers — and there are many — the show’s heart is a story about the destructive power of stasis and the need to accept what agency we have in our fate.
Sears here replaces Camille Eanga-Selenge as Sonya and Lawrence Libor takes over Tyler Pearse’s Dolokhov. Libor executes an impressive pratfall, and the luminous Sears brings such fire to a solo where Sonya vows to save her cousin that it’s easy to forget the show does little with that relationship beforehand and just feel the emotion.
The show expands to fill its new space with the complex moving pieces of Ray Hogg’s choreography while retaining charmingly lower-fi elements such as a manually rotated stage platform. Julie Fox and Joshua Quinlan’s Fabergé egg of a set design with its gilded balconies and staircases sweeps out to kiss the existing side boxes.
Thirty-two audience members sit on stage to recreate the interactivity of the original version, and the ensemble marches into the aisles, snatching patrons from their seats to dance. Kimberly Purtell’s strobing lighting, cached behind a grand chandelier, as well as a glowing ring that represents both mirror and comet, illuminates Ming Wong’s lavish period costumes to create a trancelike effect; you’re at the opera, but you’re also at the club.
While my issues with Malloy’s libretto persist — the characters declaim their reactions at length via the novel’s narration straight from a 1922 translation, rather than authentically experiencing them as theatrical figures — I found my qualms largely vanishing when watching the remount.
The high volume of the original production, delivered in surround sound, had made some important revelations difficult to hear. But while there are a couple of notable sonic hiccups here, the lyrical avalanche is generally easy to parse, Brian Kenny’s sound design more balanced and less overwhelming when coming from one direction.
The production even makes cheeky fun of the more cavernous space with a reverberating sound cue which implies we’re still all at this party together, though the halls take longer to traverse.
In the end, this Comet shines even more brightly when illuminating a larger theatre.
Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 runs at the Royal Alexandra Theatre until August 24. Tickets are available here.
Intermission reviews are independent and unrelated to Intermission’s partnered content. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.
WRITTEN BY
Ilana Lucas
Ilana Lucas is a professor of English in Centennial College’s School of Advancement. She is the President of the Canadian Theatre Critics Association. She holds a BA in English and Theatre from Princeton University, an MFA in Dramaturgy and Script Development from Columbia University, and serves as Princeton’s Alumni Schools Committee Chair for Western Ontario. She has written for Brit+Co, Mooney on Theatre, and BroadwayWorld Toronto. Her most recent play, Let’s Talk, won the 2019 Toronto Fringe Festival’s 24-Hour Playwriting Contest. She has a deep and abiding love of musical theatre, and considers her year working for the estate of Tony winners Phyllis Newman and Adolph Green one of her most treasured memories.
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