Hello! Guest writer Owen here for Avocado Music Club, here to talk about my favorite album, the Original Broadway Cast Recording of Dave Malloy’s “electro-pop opera” (sure) Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812.
I became familiar with Great Comet shortly after it came out, as I was accompanying a cabaret in which someone brought me the sheet music for Sonya Alone. The show had just lost all of its major Tony Awards to Dear Evan Hansen (which you may know as a show in which Ben Platt showed off how normal he is), and it shortly closed after the exit of star Josh Groban, whose absence resulted in poor ticket sales. Over the years, I revisited the album many times, falling fully in love with it in 2022 as I joined what became the first of three ill-fated attempts to produce/direct/work on the show. It’ll happen one day.
Most musicals are recorded with a live band, but Great Comet does you one better: it’s a fully sung-through oratorio (no dialogue scenes!) with a live, on-stage band that the actors bob and weave in and out of. In the album itself, you hear the singing ensemble grab clarinets, accordions and violins, Pierre on piano, Dolokhov on guitar, Princess Mary on accordion, and of course, Balaga on the egg shaker. (When the show was first produced in 2014 in a tent, egg shakers, and sometimes shots of “vodka,” were handed out to the audience.) The 14-piece band (plus ten actor-musicians) are enhanced by an instrumentalist who exclusively plays the sound cues on a computer, who drives most of the songs: think about the unusual beat pattern in “In My House,” in which the emphasis is on beats 2 and 3 of a 4-beat measure, or the oboe solos in the middle of a rave in “The Duel,” or the Monty Python castanets- but they have pitch!- in “Balaga.” This completely unique fusion of folk music, Russian dances, the computer, and a vocal score that was uniquely written for the actors creates a vibe that is, in musical theater terms, absolutely nuts. It’s still my dream to conduct, play any instrument in, direct, or be part of in any way: there is something truly participatory about it for the audience, and even for the listener of the album – the instruments are right there in the room! – that reflects the best of what live performance can be.
You can get away with tricks on the stage, but technical ingenuity is nothing on an album without a good story. Thankfully, Great Comet has a very good story. Drawing from only 70 pages of War and Peace, and blowing them up into a two-hour musical, lends melodramatic weight to the smallest actions, and the “oratorio” style (in which people describe their feelings and actions to the audience as part of the performance) helps make the plot extremely comprehensible just to the ears. (The Broadway stage was designed as a series of concentric circles and swooping stairways, so it was very possible to miss some of the visual action from your seat.)
The plot, to me, is one of inevitability – “Was there ever any other way my life could be?” Pierre asks in one of his spirals. Most stories about desire are about characters making choices, whether wonderful or terrible, but Malloy paints his characters as unable to stop themselves from the decisions they make, pulled along by their own desire. They reflect the characters of Jane Campion, whose protagonist in The Piano writes “I am afraid of my will, of what it might do, it is so strange and strong.” Campion’s first theatrical film, Sweetie, is about a woman named Sweetie who does whatever she wants at any time, and can’t be stopped. At the end of the movie, Sweetie covers herself in tar and jumps naked in her treehouse. The treehouse collapses and she dies- but she did what she wanted, not stopping to make a choice. It was inevitable.
In perhaps my first of many late nights thinking and talking about Comet, I realized that Pierre, Natasha, Anatole, Sonya, and the rest would all go out like Sweetie if they could. Natasha has to ruin her social standing, Anatole has to seduce her, Pierre has to drink too much and mope, even Sonya has to take care of Natasha- watch her turn in “Sonya Alone” (the stretch from the argument to her gaining resolve is heart-shattering, my favorite part of the album) from “Is it all on me?” to “It’s all on me.” These are not choices, these are states of being, inherent to their lives: until the end of the album, where Pierre finally makes one choice, one tiny choice – to say a kind word – that will change his and Natasha’s lives forever. In the book, Pierre and Natasha end up getting married, but I think it’s best not to know here. All we are supposed to know about these people are the two hours of time we spend with them, and that makes Pierre’s declaration of love feel like the most important thing in the world.
There’s so much more to talk about: the expository intro (audiences were given a family tree as part of the program), the humor (Balaga’s troika “flying at 12 miles an hour”), the references to things that are so much bigger than the scope of the show (the candle and the mirror in “Sunday Morning”), the mix of poetry (“I laugh and blush, and I hear guitars”) with didacticism (“I know they’ll like me, everyone has always liked me”), and the final appearance of the comet, uniting everyone in awe, even if it means something different to everyone in the city and everyone listening at home too. I’ll keep it brief for now, but please tell me what you thought about it, even parts you didn’t like. I’ll weep tears of thanks.
Where to now? Next Week’s Album: Ronnie Lane – One for the Road (1976)