Director and choreographer Katie Spelman’s staging of “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812” is a formidable achievement for Writers Theatre. It’s a powerful, visually gorgeous production with a sophistication that matches the aesthetics of its spectacular building and a reminder that Spelman has become an essential director of immersive, mid-sized, Chicago-style musicals. Over the last year or so, her ensemble-based way of working has become a worthy heir to an aesthetic path blazed by Gary Griffin at Chicago Shakespeare Theater and the work of the late, great Rachel Rockwell at theaters all over town.
Better yet, this production features an all-Chicago cast of 13. Stocked with talent, the show includes, as Hélène, Bri Sudia, whose year in “A Beautiful Noise” on Broadway seems to have ignited a whole other level of vocal excitement from this superb performer. Maya Rowe builds a Sonya filled with complexity and longing, Joseph Anthony Byrd is magnetic as Anatole and, as Natasha, the newcomer Aurora Penepacker is a name you’re likely reading for the first time in a theater review but surely not the last.
As Pierre, Glencoe audiences can enjoy the unselfish but formidable work of Evan Tyrone Martin in a role played on Broadway by Josh Groban.
I could go on through the cast list but you get the idea. It’s top drawer, all the way through.
With her production of “Once,” Spelman figured out how to use the mainstage at Writers to create a live version of surround sound, embracing the whole thrust theater as part of the playable space and pleasing the ear from all directions. But the through-composed “Comet,” penned by Dave Malloy and musically directed here by Matt Deitchman, is a far more difficult piece than “Once.”
It’s stylistically tricky, occasionally elusive of narrative and (to my mind) could never decide whether its fundamental impulse was to satirize all of the fevered goings-on in Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” from a contemporary vista or embrace their excess, as lived in the moment. For good and bad, the musical adaptation goes back and forth and actors just have to adjust.
The show has two roaring act openers in the song “Prologue” (“Natasha is young and Andrey isn’t here”), a clever number structured like “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” and the fabulously zesty “Letters” (“We put down in writing / what’s happening in our minds”). But it otherwise has a complex, ruminative score ranging across musical styles as Malloy focuses on the Book Two part of the Tolstoy epic. Here, Andrey is off tending to wounds, Natasha is sexually inquisitive and Pierre is suffering from ennui, at least until he finds solace in seeing the titular great comet of 1812, streaking across the sky and blowing early 19th century Russian minds.
I have deep emotional connections to many Broadway musicals. “Comet” had not been on that list, mostly, I felt, because that was not Malloy’s aim. On Broadway in 2016, I thought the show was dominated both by Groban’s star performance and it being the first show to rip apart a Broadway venue to create a more intimate playing space (several others blew their budget by following that idea).
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The material is not for all tastes. But none of that detracts from my enthusiasm for this production, which uses eight live musicians and is both sexier than the one on Broadway and more in touch with the characters’ inner lives. At Writers Theatre, you get the chance to reconsider the piece as an ensemble-based experience and rediscover such strengths as Sonya’s critical thinking (superbly wrought by Rowe), Natasha’s pulsating if pathetic passions (as expressed quite delightfully by Penepacker) and, more generally, the folly of a society where most people cared very deeply about all the wrong things, being oblivious to their transience. Malloy gives most everyone their moment to sing their thing. For the moment.
None of what Spelman achieves here would have been possible without Courtney O’Neill’s set design, perhaps the best set I’ve ever seen at Writers for the way it manages to be both intimate and grand; it’s lush in appearance but never superfluous and is also comedically wicked, if you look hard. O’Neill’s work is the ideal match for this show with this particular director and further confirmation that Glencoe has quite the world-class show running in its downtown. If you are in streaking distance, I can’t imagine why you would not go.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
Review: “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812” (4 stars)
When: Through Oct. 27
Where: Writers Theatre, 325 Tudor Court, Glencoe
Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes
Tickets: $40-$110 at 847-242-6000 and www.writerstheatre.org
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