Tail End of the Comet

I really enjoyed the off-Broadway version of Natasha, Pierre, & the Great Comet of 1812. In fact it was one of the best plays of 2013, in my opinion.

When the show moved to Broadway with vocal superstar Josh Groban in the cast, I wondered if director Rachel Chavken would be able to reproduce the intimate feel of the show that gave it so much of its appeal.

Well, the reviews came back as very positive, so it seemed that, yes, she was able to keep the magic of the earlier version, in spite of losing the original Natasha, Phillipa Soo, who had gone on to create the role of Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton in Lin-Manuel Miranda's blockbuster musical about a certain Treasury Secretary.

My spouse also enjoyed Chavken's off-Broadway version of Great Comet, and as she had undertaken to read its source material (a slim novel by Tolstoy called War and Peace), I told her I would buy us tickets to the Broadway show... as soon as she finished the book. Well, she isn't even half-way through with the novel (which is a mere 1,273 pages), but the show is closing, so I went ahead and got us tickets.

Okieriete "Oak" Onaodowan replaced Groban as Pierre, and I thought we were going to see him, but then he left the show, to be ultimately replaced by the show's creator, Dave Malloy, for the end of the run. However, until Malloy joins the cast, the role is being performed by Scott Strangland, the actor I saw last night. The original Broadway Natasha, Denée Benton, is still with the show, but I saw her understudy, Lauren Zakrin.

And was I disappointed? No. Strangland and Zakrin's big scene at the end of the show was amazing and had me in tears. Malloy does something quite clever, and in an otherwise sung-through musical stops the singing at a key moment to allow the main characters to speak their lines for the first time. This adds to the intensity, and allows the truth of the moment to stand out. We get to see a very real human connection between two flawed but fundamentally decent human beings.

Returning from the off-Broadway production is Amber Gray as Hélène, the promiscuous wife of Pierre who also helps to trap Natasha into an ill-fated affair with Hélène's brother, Anatole. (Yes, it's a Russian novel, so it's complicated.) Gray quite impressed me as Persephone in Hadestown (also directed by Chavken), so I was glad to see her again. It was likewise a pleasure to see Brittain Ashford again as Sonya. Her folk-infused number "Sonya Alone" stands out from the rest of the show both in terms of its musical idiom and its perspective from someone not at the center of the action, but deeply concerned about her friend.

Sadly, Great Comet is closing on September 3rd, so see it while you can. When I bought tickets, the guy at the box office advised me that the mezzanine seats were preferable to orchestra tickets, and after seeing the show from the mezzanine, I'm inclined to agree. Wherever you sit, however, I'm sure you'll enjoy it.

The Power of Darkness

Leo Tolstoy's play The Power of Darkness is known for one of the most infamous sound effects in the history of dramatic literature: a baby's bones being crunched.

In the play, the peasant Nikita gets his stepdaughter pregnant. She gives birth just as the family arranges for her to be married off to someone else. What is to be done with the infant?

There are foundlings' hospitals, but rumors could get out. Pressured by his mother and his wife, Nikita goes down into the cellar, places a board on top of the infant, and crushes the child to death. He immediately suffers from remorse, saying, "How the little bones crunched under me. Krr... kr... What have they made me do?"

Though Tolstoy wrote the play in 1886, it was officially banned in Russia until 1902. There were numerous private performances, however, and it appeared in a French translation on the Paris stage in 1888. An 1895 production in St. Petersburg managed to get passed the censors, but only after Tolstoy agreed to write an alternate scene with less explicit baby crushing.

Gradually the play's fame spread, and today The Power of Darkness remains one of the most famous examples of Naturalism in drama.

Best Plays of 2013

It's that time of year when people put together their lists of the best plays they've seen over the past 12 months. I've decided to limit myself to performances in New York City that opened in 2013. (Sorry Sleep No More and Heute: Kohlhaas, but you don't qualify.)

So in reverse order, here they are:

#10 KAFKA'S MONKEY
Theatre for a New Audience clearly knew what it was doing when it brought over this one-woman show featuring Kathryn Hunter from The Young Vic in London. Franz Kafka's "A Report to an Academy" came to life like I'd never imagined.

#9 HERAKLES
Aquila Theatre revived this ancient play by Euripides using interviews with actual war veterans in lieu of the choral numbers. Unfortunately, there were only a handful of performances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in March. Still, those who saw the show will not easily forget it.

#8 FIX ME JESUS
Helen Sneed's comedy about a Texas woman having a mental breakdown in the dressing room of a Neiman Marcus was surprisingly emotional. The Abingdon Theatre did a great job with this piece, which featured fine performances by Lee Roy Rogers, Polly Lee, and Lori Gardner, among others.

#7 NATASHA, PIERRE AND THE GREAT COMET OF 1812
Not everyone I've talked to has loved this show, but I find Dave Malloy's songs to be enchanting. Plus, that Tolstoy guy really knew how to tell a story! This immersive theatre experience was a triumph for the non-profit Ars Nova, and has moved on uptown with a commercial production near Times Square.

#6 THE MUTILATED
How could anyone possibly perform this outrageous late play by Tennessee Williams? By casting Penny Arcade and Mink Stole, of course. This all-too-brief run at the New Ohio Theatre deserved all of the praise it received, and then some. It's a pity the Christmas-themed show had to close before the holidays.

#5 THE COMEDY OF ERRORS
As much as I enjoyed the musicalized version of Love's Labour's Lost this summer, the Public did an even better job with The Comedy of Errors, setting Shakespeare's tale of mis-matched twins in upstate New York. Hamish Linklater and Jesse Tyler Ferguson were hysterical, and Heidi Schreck made a wonderful Adriana.

#4 SAINT JOAN
Bedlam's production of the classic by George Bernard Shaw uses only four actors to tell a magnificent story. This stripped-down, bare-bones version gets to the heart of the story of Joan of Arc, and breaks the audience's heart in the process. Special praise goes to Eric Tucker, who both directs and plays Warwick. It's still running, so get your tickets now!

#3 UNLOCK'D
Sam Carner and Derek Gregor have been working for years on this musical based loosely on Alexander Pope's mock epic poem The Rape of the Lock. Though the material does not seem the most likely candidate for becoming a musical comedy, they pulled it off with panache in Prospect Theatre Company's world premier of the work this summer. Just when you think you know where the play is headed, it goes in a delightful new direction. This show deserves to be done all across the country.

#2 TAMAR OF THE RIVER
Perhaps I'm a little biased, but Marisa Michelson and Joshua H. Cohen gave this town one of the most innovative new musicals it has seen in a long time, beating out even Unlock'd. Kudos to Prospect Theatre Company for producing two of the top plays on this list! I saw Tamar three times, and enjoyed it more with each performance. I know of no immediate plans for a larger production, but some bright producer needs to bring this musical to a larger stage, though hopefully keeping most of the brilliant staging by director Daniel Goldstein.

#1 DIALOGUES DES CARMELITES
This Poulenc opera blew me away when I saw it at the Met in May. They nailed the final scene, where the nuns are guillotined one by one, and all of those voices singing "Salve Regina" go quiet, one after another, until there is only one left, and then.... The world today still faces religious oppression, and far more serious attacks than the "War on Christmas" hyped by Fox News, or the bogus pseudo-attacks on "freedom of religion" that have the American Catholic Bishops constantly crying wolf. This tale of Sister Blanche (not quite a historical figure, but there were plenty of women like her) reminds us that true Christianity calls for self-sacrifice, not constant self-aggrandizement.


So that's my list. Honorable mentions go out to Atlantic Theater Company's The Jammer, La MaMa's Iphigenia at Aulis, Roundabout's The Winslow Boy, and Signature's Cheri.

The Great Comet

Last night, I saw Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812. The show has moved uptown to a tent in the same empty lot on West 45th Street where the Spiegeltent was last year.

The set-up worked quite wonderfully. Most of the action took place in the center of the floor, flanked by tables where the audience sat and enjoyed drinks and snacks. Around us, however, were raised platforms where additional scenes took place, and where there were additional tables for the audience. We were told that there were no bad seats, and I believe it. We came early, but found they assigned us seats, anyway. This meant we didn't have a choice of where to sit, as is usually the case with general admission, but it all seems to work out for the best, given how well the piece is staged.

The music, composed by Dave Malloy, was fun, though not always memorable. That was fine, however, especially when some of the lyrics (also Malloy's) were so clever. During the opening sequence, the audience is introduced to the cast of characters in a song that keeps adding one more person before repeating everything that came before, a la "Rattlin' Bog" or "Partridge in a Pear Tree." If you still had trouble following the action, there was a family tree (with illustrations) included in the program.

This adaptation of War and Peace made me once again appreciate the brilliance and honesty of Tolstoy's writing. Toward the end, when Pierre asks Natasha whether or not she really loved Anatole, she responds, "I don't know." Instead of renouncing him for a cad or holding fast to the memory or her passion, she is confused, and admits her confusion. It's a wonderful moment.

Originally, Malloy himself played the role of Pierre, but David Abeles, who originated the role of Eamon in Once, has taken over as that character. He does a magnificent job, as do fellow cast members including Phillipa Soo as Natasha and Brittain Ashford as Sonya. I saw the understudy for Anatole, Azudi Onyejekwe, but he also was quite wonderful.

Thoughts on Gorky

Maxim Gorky, born Alexi Maximovich Peshkov in 1868, was one of those rare proletarian writers who actually came from the proletariat. While Count Lev Tolstoy, who would later develop a friendship with Gorky, would wear peasant shirts and sympathize with the poor, Gorky actually knew what it was like to be poor. His working-class father died of cholera in 1871, and two years later his mother left him to be brought up by his grandparents. After his mother died of tuberculosis in 1879, his grandfather sent the 11-year-old boy to work in a shoe store, the first in a series of menial jobs. Lacking any sort of formal schooling from that point on, the young boy gave himself his own education, reading whenever and wherever he could.

As a teenager, he encountered the short stories of Anton Chekhov, who would later have a profound impact on his life. After a botched Christmas Eve suicide attempt when he was nineteen (following the deaths of his grandparents), Gorky wandered about, periodically getting in trouble with the law for being a suspected subversive. In 1892, he published his first short story, and used Maxim Gorky (which means "bitter") as a pen name. He continued to have success with his writings. In 1898 he sent his two volumes of collected stories to Chekhov, beginning a life-long correspondence and friendship.

In 1900, Chekhov introduced Gorky to the Moscow Art Theatre and urged him to write a play. His first finished play, The Philistines, was heavily censored when it was performed in 1902. Later that year the Moscow Art Theatre premiered The Lower Depths, directed by Konstantin Stanislavsky, who also played the role of Satin. The play soon became an international success. The increasingly political Gorky turned over a good deal of his profits from the play to the Russian Social Democratic Party after meeting one of the party's rising stars, Vladimir Lenin.

Gorky had a falling out with the Moscow Art Theatre in 1904. The theatre's co-founder, Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, heavily criticized Gorky's play Summerfolk. Though Gorky ended up extensively rewriting the play after the harsh critique, he took the script elsewhere, and it premiered in St. Petersburg. Gorky continued to get in trouble with the Czarist government for his political activities, and he wrote his 1905 play Children of the Sun while imprisoned. After a couple months, he was released following pleas from numerous Western authors.

The year 1905 also saw a failed upraising against the government, and Gorky fled the country the following year. He ended up in New York where he wrote the novel Mother, reportedly in a house on Staten Island. The novel would later be adapted into a play by Bertolt Brecht and an opera by Valery Zhelobinsky. Gorky wrote the play Vassa Zheleznova on the island of Capri in 1910. His relationship with Lenin was touch-and-go for a while, but when Lenin and his party made Pravda their official newspaper, Gorky contributed financially to the publication.

After the Czar announced in 1913 a general amnesty for non-violent political exiles, Gorky returned to Russia. During the 1917 revolution many people on the right and the left attacked Gorky. The author was still close enough with Lenin to intercede on behalf of numerous writers. He helped Viktor Shklovsky get a travel permit, but tried in vain to help Alexander Blok, securing permission for him to leave Russia for health reasons only after Blok had already died. In 1921, Gorky himself left Russia, ostensibly for his health, but he was clearly disillusioned with the revolution.

Joseph Stalin rose to power after Lenin's death and sought to get Gorky to return. After a couple of visits, Gorky returned to Russia for good in 1931, dying in 1936.