The Knockturnal talks with members of the creative team of the Tony Award-nominated musical, Natasha, Pierre, & The Great Comet of 1812.
On the morning of May 3rd, the day after the 71st annual Tony Award nominations was announced, the nominees convened in New York City’s Sofitel to celebrate and talk with members of the press about their shows. Leading the pack is the musical Natasha, Pierre, & The Great Comet of 1812 with a whopping 12 nominations, including Best Musical. The musical began as a low budget immersive production at Ars Nova in New York, soared to the acclaimed American Repertory Theater in Boston, and has now landed on Broadway. We had the opportunity to chat with some of the creative team behind Great Comet about the thrills and challenges of growing the production to a larger scale and the process of creating an immersive work for the Broadway stage.
DAVE MALLOY (Book, Music, and Lyrics, Nominated for Best Book of a Musical, Best Original Score, and Best Orchestrations) “I’ve always been someone who has a very high-low aesthetic, and also commercial versus experimental aesthetic. I love watching, you know, the most avant-garde, outlandish things and then I love watching superhero movies and I really equally value both of those things. And so for me, to bring this show which started more in this kind of downtown experimental world and again, it’s like, War and Peace is like a vastly experimental novel. It’s a really weird book, there are hundreds of pages that are just military history and the characters are gone. So following in those footsteps of like when that book came out people were like, ‘This isn’t a novel, what is this?’ and Tolstoy is like, ‘Yeah, I don’t know, it’s just what I wrote.’ So for me to kind of take Tolstoy’s direction on that and then to stay true to that while still adapting it to a Broadway house and kind of marrying those two worlds has been such a gift. It’s such a treat for me to see that happen and to see it be so well received.”
RACHEL CHAVKIN (Director, Nominated for Best Direction of a Musical) “We were never told no. In fact, Jason Eagan (Founding Artistic Director at Ars Nova), I mean the original production at Ars (Nova) was one of the first things I ever really, like first professional gigs that I ever had and I had been self-producing my own work but that felt very different. Jason called me weeks after the set should’ve been getting built and Ars Nova had done only one production that season so that they could support the show and we were still ridiculously over budget, and Jason called me and he was like, ‘The new reduced set isn’t as good,’ and I was like, ‘Jason, I know. Mimi knows,’ and then he called it a poor man’s Joe’s Pub. And he said, ‘Your job is to tell me to tell my board why we have to pay for the whole set,’ and I was like, ‘Go yell at your board.’ And that’s been the case with every single producer the show has been touched by.”
DIANE PAULUS (Artistic Director of American Repertory Theater, which produced Great Comet) “My team at A.R.T. fell in love with this production when it was originally commissioned and produced by Jason (Eagan) at Ars Nova. We fell in love with it, it was right up our alley in terms of what we believe in at A.R.T. to expand the boundaries of theatre, and I think what you see with this journey is it’s an ecosystem of how great American theatre can be born. It starts with an amazing inspired company like Ars Nova, it has a life, it starts to figure out what it can be, and we just saw the opportunity to invite Howard and Janet (Kagan, producers) whom I so admire and that incredible creative team to play in our theater. Could this show have a life in a 600 seat proscenium space? And my theatre went upside down to make this work. There were seats where there were never seats, the audience walked in the back, and I think it was an invaluble experiment for this show’s DNA, could it grow, could it then, in my opinion, reach the large audience it deserved, which is what Broadway’s about.”
Natasha, Pierre, & The Great Comet of 1812 is now playing at the Imperial Theatre in New York City at 249 W. 45th St.
The Tony Awards will be broadcast live Sunday, June 11 8/7c on CBS and hosted by Kevin Spacey.
