You couldn’t read about it (but thank you if you are still reading this), and pictures and video couldn’t do it justice. This may be trite, but “Comet” was something you had to experience. I love when a piece of theatre relies on a powerful visual theme and dares to be big-after all, I was weaned on Hal Prince’s “Show Boat” and “Phantom of the Opera.” Taken together, the costumes by Paloma Young and Tony-winning sets by Mimi Lien and lighting by Bradley King created one of the most impressive mise-en-scènes of recent memory. Both times I was struck by how well the Imperial had been transformed-at no small cost-to re-create and in some ways heighten the atmosphere that had been devised Off-Broadway. I paid a visit in January 2017, sitting amid the action onstage, and stopped in again last week, this time from a nice perch in the Rear Mezzanine. When the show finally premiered at the Imperial Theatre on Broadway to rave reviews in November 2016, I was happily proven wrong on all fronts. Try to re-create the salon setting in a big auditorium and surely the immediacy of the performances would be lost.
Slap the show behind a proscenium and it would be a nothing-burger. The show was fun and transformative isn’t that enough?Īt the time I also thought there was no way “Comet” could transfer to Broadway because the subject matter was off-beat and, more importantly, there seemed to be no house (save maybe the Circle in the Square) that could do justice to the immersive experience, which increasingly seemed to me to be the whole point. Or maybe it was just a matter of personal bias? The foibles and ennui of 19th Century Russian aristocracy just didn’t seem all too compelling to me. I thought, perhaps, I had missed something about the plot or characters, both of which seemed to have bewitched the most devoted “Comet” fans. I walked away swept up in the pure theatricality of the performance, if not a little unmoved by the underlying story. It was refreshing to see something so new and fully realized. That admiration has not waned in the years since. An intimate melodramatic modern opera set against an epic, cosmic background, I admired the sheer ambition of the production penned by Dave Malloy and directed by Rachel Chavkin. I first caught the show at one of its final performances in 2014 at the lot on 45th Street. Through its initial incarnation to its subsequent Kazino mountings under a tent in the Meatpacking District and in a vacant lot on 45th Street (2013-2014), and a run at the A.R.T. It was clear that something special was happening Off-Broadway. He lives in Brooklyn.“ Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812”-a musicalized 70 page excerpt from Tolstoy’s “War in Peace”-plays its final performance on Broadway today, capping a five-year journey that began at Ars Nova in 2012.įrom the get go, “Comet” demanded attention. He has won a Jonathan Larson Grant, an ASCAP New Horizons Award, and a NEA/TCG Grant for Theatre Designers has been a Guest Professor in devised music theater at Princeton and Vassar Universities, and a Resident Artist at Ars Nova and Sundance's Ucross Foundation and is the composer for Banana Bag & Bodice. Other musicals include Black Wizard / Blue Wizard, Beowulf – A Thousand Years of Baggage (2011 Edinburgh Herald Angel, 2008 Glickman Award), Beardo, Sandwich, and Clown Bible. He is also one of the co-creators/performers of Three Pianos, a drunken romp through Schubert’s Winterreise that won an OBIE in 2010. Comet premiered at Ars Nova in the fall of 2012 before transferring Off-Broadway to Kazino, a Russian supper club built specially for the show the show won multiple awards, including the Richard Rodgers Award and an OBIE. He has written the music for eight musicals, including Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812, an electropop opera based on War & Peace. Dave Malloy is a composer/writer/performer/sound designer.