Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet at Crow's Theatre.DAHLIA KATZ/Crow's Theatre
- Title: Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812
- Composer, librettist, orchestrator: Dave Malloy
- Director: Chris Abraham
- Actors: Hailey Gillis, Evan Buliung
- Company: Crow’s Theatre and the Musical Stage Company
- Venue: Guloien Theatre at the Streetcar Crowsnest
- City: Toronto
- Year: Runs to Jan. 28, 2024
Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 certainly has a great Natasha and a great Pierre in its Canadian premiere at Toronto’s Crow’s Theatre in co-production with the Musical Stage Company.
As the titular protagonists of Dave Malloy’s idiosyncratic musical adaptation of a piece of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Hailey Gillis and Evan Buliung are the celestial phenomena you can’t tear your eyes or ears away from. Better than their counterparts in the original 2016 Broadway production, in my opinion.
The two act the heck out of this challenging material, finding all the humanity and the humour in Malloy’s mouth-cluttering lyrics, largely adapted from Aylmer and Louise Maude’s 1922 English translation of Tolstoy’s great Russian novel set during the Napoleonic Wars.
Gillis, a darling of Toronto’s musical theatre scene, gives her most luminous, layered performance yet as Countess Natasha. The 19-year-old, engaged to a soldier named Andre who is off fighting Napoleon, goes to Moscow to stay a spell with her godmother Marya (Louise Pitre).
She gives a masterclass in mining the emotional complexity and finding the narrative arc in a song without sacrificing musicality in her rendition of the early ear-pleaser No One Else. This tune, in which the teenager simply wanders through the snow, staring at the moon, lost in love and full of life, had me in tears with its bittersweet beauty.
Natasha’s contentment does not last long: She quickly falls for the charming, handsome and secret-hiding Anatole (George Krissa) after setting eyes on him at the opera. As the character is torn between the man in front of her and the man at the front, Gillis’s performance never leans on ingenue tropes but veers from hunger to hauntedness, delivering a portrait of almost feral femininity that feels both very today and very Tolstoy.
(l-r back) Evan Buliung, Andrew Penner (l-r front) George Krissa, Brendan Wall, Lawrence Libor in Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet at Crow's Theatre.DAHLIA KATZ/Crow's Theatre
Much of The Great Comet’s plot concerns Natasha and her interactions with her cold prospective sister-in-law (Heeyun Park, a wry standout), her love-hate friendship with nosy cousin Sonya (Camille Eanga-Selenge) and all the intrigue surrounding a possible elopement.
So what about Pierre? Well, the unhappily married older man spends most of the show in his study where he, per a letter he writes in the banger that opens the second act, drinks and reads and drinks and reads and drinks. He’s an early-19th-century version of today’s doomscrollers, falling down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories about Napoleon. (Malloy, unsurprisingly, went on to write a great chamber musical about Internet addiction called Octet.)
In his depiction of this alcoholic’s mid-life crisis, a floundering search for meaning, Buliung brings to the stage a fully Chekhovian fool – comical and cringeworthy and ultimately loveable. He chews the lyrics when cranky, then conjures a deeply soulful sound when Pierre lets out his yearning for something more. He eventually finds a grand gesture and redemption not in a duel or in heroic rescue, but in simply speaking a few words of kindness in a harsh world.
Malloy’s musical is strange in many ways. His sung-through score romps from Eastern European folk to electro-pop; his lyrics are in the style of storytelling theatre, with characters singing both speech and narration. There are passages in it that thrill in every single way and make you feel like you’re witnessing genius – and stretches that seem like overlong recitative.
It needs creative staging to come alive outside of a recording – its original series of immersive New York productions were inspired by Russian supper clubs.
(l-r) Divine Brown, Camille Eanga-Selenge, Hailey Gillis (back) George Krissa in Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet at Crow's Theatre.DAHLIA KATZ/Crow's Theatre
In the Crow’s Theatre main space, director Chris Abraham follows in those footsteps on a set co-designed by Julie Fox and Joshua Quinlan – a smallish rotating square of a stage, surrounded by stairs that lead to catwalks. Some of the audience sits right up close to the action at cabaret tables and on bar stools, and individual attendees occasionally get pulled into the action by characters in a way that can be a bit goofy but is generally fun.
There are frustrations to the staging, however: From my perch in more traditional forward-facing seats, the physical movements of the actors were sometimes hard to follow, with moments where I craned my neck to try to look at the performer who was singing, or times when they dipped out of sight altogether.
Abraham’s direction also involves much rushing around and up and down that felt unnecessary and confused the storytelling, which could also use a clearer distinction when actors are in character, narrating or being part of the ensemble.
Ray Hogg’s choreography, too, is a hit-or-miss mix of contemporary dance moves from the club and Russian folk dancing. There were moments of pleasurable anachronism and others where movements seemed strange or out of place.
Like a comet, both Malloy’s musical and this production are streaky. Like a comet, you won’t want to miss it.
J. Kelly Nestruck