Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 by Dave Malloy (review)

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• Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 by Dave Malloy
• Adam Day Howard

NATASHA, PIERRE & THE GREAT COMET OF 1812. Book, music, and lyrics by Dave Malloy. Directed by Victoria Bussert. Great Lakes Theater, Cleveland. September 24, 2023.

The Great Lakes Theater needs no introduction. It has been at the forefront of the regional theatre movement since the 1960s, with luminaries like Arthur Lithgow at the helm. Its impact both regionally and nationally makes it an ideal choice to stage a new production of Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812. Writer-composer Dave Malloy is a Cleveland native, and his strong connection to the artistic community of Cleveland and its suburb Lakewood runs parallel to the Great Lakes Theater’s.

As the afternoon began, the stage was set for a blurring of lines between company and audience; the curtain was raised before the house was even open. The Hanna Theatre already boasts bar and lounge-style seating, perfect for a musical that takes place in a Russian club. Onstage bar seating was available for a few lucky ticket holders, and the seats nearest the stage had been reimagined as art-deco bar seating so that audience members could place their elbows on the stage itself. The vibe created by the set continued for the entire evening, drawing us into a sense of being somewhere we shouldn’t go—but as long we were there, we might as well enjoy ourselves.

The dark red tones of the set bled into the theatre as backlit shelves full of liquor bottles hinted at the boozy haze that the characters would inhabit. For its 2016-17 Broadway run at the Imperial Theatre, the set design for Great Comet was positively Seussian in its deconstruction of the theatre space. Regional theatre may not have the freedom or the means to take sets quite that far, but the Great Lakes Theater still masterfully blurred the liminal spaces between stage and house, company and audience.

Bussert’s cast and a live (though hidden) orchestra conveyed an immediacy that sat within the script’s nineteenth-century setting. The ensemble transmitted a strong contemporary energy that defied gender binaries while evoking the panache and energy of a bygone era of tsarist grandeur. Their performances teasingly cajoled us into audience participation, clapping along and becoming part of the club scene that animated the entire performance.

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Alex Syiek (Pierre Bezukhov) and the ensemble of Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812. (Photo courtesy of Great Lakes Theater.)

From the beginning, the ensemble made a strong case for the continued relevance of the material. Then, as now, a war was on. Still, ordinary people, while aware of the war and for the most part admiring those who fought it, were too distracted by their own lives to spare the headspace to think about war all the time. The captain of this ennui is the character Pierre Bezukhov (Alex Syiek). Pierre’s aristocratic depression made him a relatable antihero [End Page 225] for a twenty-first-century audience. His relationship with Prince Andrey, who actually fights in the war, held up a sobering mirror to US society; our military, too, is in eternal combat vaguely “abroad” while we are self-involved at home, blissfully unaware of the details yet obligingly supportive of the troops. Pierre’s desperate desire for meaning and self-respect are at odds with his marriage, in which he is a hollowed-out yes man, further compounding the tensions between his intellectual life and his emotional life.

Through blistering lighting, bringing us intense and cinematic moments of news from the frontlines, and with the deft staging of sexual tension, Bussert was able to move the audience toward sympathy for completely reprehensible characters. She struck a balance between period details and contemporary concerns, including nightclub awkwardness, dangerous relationships, and the perils of violating social conventions. The characters were all on the trolley tracks and we the audience had no levers to pull.

Watching Natasha (Jessi Kirtley) crash on the rocks of a society about which she was so naïve was deliciously uncomfortable, thanks to the effortless bohemianism of the entire...