jilipark Review: Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of Who Knows When

In a new London production of Dave Malloy’s Tolstoy-inspired pop operajilipark, “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812,” the stage is featureless but for six huge, light-up letters that spell out the show’s setting: Moscow. One of the O’s hangs overhead, and the W is facing backward with its wiring exposed — an apt metaphor for a piece that makes a comic virtue of showing its workings.

The show kicks off with an ironically condescending synopsis (“It’s a complicated Russian novel / Everyone’s got nine different names”) and proceeds in an intermittently arch mode, with performers even singing their own stage directions at some points.

Mr. Biden even held on to hope for the transformative peace deal for the Middle East that he thought was within grasp a year ago, believing it could survive even as the war between Hamas and Israel tore at its foundations.

This disarmingly whimsical storytelling style endeared “The Great Comet” to U.S. audiences when it was first performed in 2012; a 2016 Broadway production, directed by Rachel Chavkin, earned 12 Tony nominations before fizzling out ignominiously amid a casting controversy. This London revival, directed by Tim Sheader and running at the Donmar Warehouse through Feb. 8, 2025, is rendered in an offbeat, neon grunge aesthetic and wreaks playful havoc on our expectations — with mixed results.

The plot, borrowed from a 70-page segment of “War and Peace,” comprises two intertwined narratives — of coming-of-age melodrama and midlife ennui — in a 19th-century Russian aristocratic milieu.

Young, naïve Natasha (Chumisa Dornford-May), whose fiancé is away at war, becomes infatuated with a scoundrel called Anatole (Jamie Muscato), with predictably disastrous consequences. Meanwhile, middle-aged Pierre (Declan Bennett), a dissipated alcoholic stuck in a loveless marriage with an unfaithful wife, frets at length about his wasted life before eventually confessing his undying love for Natasha. Along the way we have a duel, a vodka binge and an opera-within-a-play.

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