Des McAnuff’s ‘Dr. Zhivago’ is long and complicated, but music is great

The Cossacks are coming, living conditions are miserable and a desperate love threatens to break our hero. Cue the show tunes.

A stage musical version of Dr. Zhivago, the Russian epic of love and war, has just had its world premiere in Sydney, Australia, directed by Des McAnuff, artistic director of Ontario's Stratford Shakespeare Festival and the Canadian-American who brought Jersey Boys to Broadway. (An earlier, smaller version of the show, simply called Zhivago, played in La Jolla, Calif., in 2006 .)

Dr. Zhivago is set against the chaotic events of the early 20th century: the First World War, the Russian revolution, and civil war in Russia. Yurii Zhivago (Anthony Warlow) – a doctor by profession but a poet by nature – is initially excited by the idea of political reform, but it's not long before it becomes apparent that the revolution is misguided. The political chaos is echoed by turmoil in Zhivago's personal life. While working as an army doctor at the front, he falls in love with his nurse, Lara (Lucy Maunder). But back at home, there's Tonia (Taneel Van Zyl), his wife. Lara is married, too – to Pasha (Martin Crewes), a committed revolutionary.

Novelist Boris Pasternak won the Nobel Prize for literature. David Lean's 1965 film won five Oscars. A Broadway-style musical has a lot to live up to.

The following comments about the show (in bold type) were heard during intermission and following the performance at the Lyric Theatre in Sydney on Wednesday night.

"You have to get through an awful lot of information."

Yurii's father dies, and the noble Zhivago family is left penniless. Young Yurii is adopted by a kind couple who have a daughter, Tonia. Lara's father dies. To keep a roof over their head, Lara's mother bargains away her body to the rich and powerful Komarovsky (Bartholomew John) who later turns his attentions to Lara. Politically, there is unrest among the members of the working class, and the Cossacks are sent to the square in Moscow to quell a large protest. Zhivago, now grown and a doctor, leaves a family party (where his engagement to Tonia will be announced) and goes to the square to help. This is where he catches his first glimpse of Lara.

All these events transpire during the show's first song. Yes, unnamed audience member, there is a lot of information to get through.

"The story's too dense for me to follow."

Turning this 1957 literary classic set during historical revolutionary events into a Broadway musical is certainly not unprecedented (think Les Misérables), but the challenge of doing so cannot be overstated, especially when you throw in a complicated, five-person love story that needs to feel authentic amid all the political upheaval.

The audience member who made the remark above looked young – a teenager, perhaps – so it's possible she hasn't been exposed to the book or the film.

Still, for this show to succeed, the plot and historical context must be accessible to people who have no prior exposure to the story.

Personally, I felt the creative team achieved this, but at least one person disagreed with me Wednesday night.

"I thought that [insert hand gesture here] was unnecessary."

I'm not really sure what this woman was referring to with this at-the-bar charades-like assessment to her date, but here's a guess: Enormous black and white photographs are projected onto a screen behind the stage at various points in the show, and they have a tendency to overpower the action, most noticeably and bizarrely when a portrait of Lara transforms into soft porn (well, it would have been considered pornographic in Czarist Russia, certainly). In the photograph, Lara, nude, is posed with her back to the camera, covered by a sheet. Through the magic of technology, the sheet is lowered, leaving the audience with a partial view of one breast and her derrière. I'm no prude but this stage trick felt unnecessary. Worse, it distracted from Maunder's live performance of When the Music Played.

"He's too old for the role."

Warlow, 49, is admittedly a bit long in the tooth to play Yurii, especially early on when he's supposed to be a young man fresh out of medical school. But I must add, so what? Warlow sings with confidence and strength, and owns the stage from the moment he sings his first note. The impression he's a bit old for the role falls away pretty quickly, and the audience is left with a superb performance by one of Australia's most revered stage actors.

"Hopefully there'll be more chemistry onstage between the two of them."

While Warlow's performance as Yurii is extraordinary, and Maunder as Lara sounds very good, there most certainly is a deficiency in the chemistry department here. The audience expected Omar Sharif and Julie Christie's grade of smouldering, forbidden love, but the Warlow-Maunder connection is not even warm.

Blame some less than satisfactory character development – Lara in particular fails to emerge as a three-dimensional character worthy of the love of three men – and some between-songs dialogue between these two that just didn't ring true. Yurii and Lara's wartime reunion at the library in the Urals is particularly awkward.

"I loved that song."

Which song? Take your pick. Lucy Simon has created a terrific score with no shortage of showstoppers. Highlights include the Russian-flavoured Wedding Vows, the one-two punch opening Act 2 of Women and Little Children/He's There, the wartime lament Blood on the Snow, the very powerful In This House, and Yurii and Lara's duet Now (although the melody reminded me just a tiny bit of the Bee Gees hit Words).

"It was very well done. But very long too. It was about three hours long."

Close. The show clocked in at two hours and 45 minutes, including a 20-minute intermission. Distilling a story spanning an eventful 20 years into a single night of entertainment is a challenge. The second act could use a trim.

My two rubles worth

It's is a much-loved and powerful story, deserving of a musical stage treatment. This adaptation, however, is a little disappointing; Michael Weller's book is uneven, with some awkward dialogue and some situations the audience simply doesn't buy. There are wonderful performances. (Crewes and John deserve noting as well as Warlow.) While Michael Scott-Mitchell's set is excellent (grand columns in the first act, crumbling walls and broken windows in the second), some of the staging felt a little clunky. But Simon has written a powerful score, which suggests the work has a promising future.

Dr. Zhivago