The highly charged theatrical experience that is Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 begins the moment you step inside the dramatically transformed Imperial Theatre.
The first five orchestra rows have disappeared and small round tables with lamps have sprouted among the seats; the stage is reconfigured to accommodate cabaret-style seating. The playing area is everywhere: on curved elevated ramps and stairs that wind throughout the orchestra and mezzanine, raised platforms at the back of the theatre, and an oval disk in the center. Clusters of starburst chandeliers hang low from the ceiling, galleries of 19th century paintings adorn the walls, and lush red velvet drapes surround you. For the next two and a half hours, both the audience and the performers will be immersed in a Russian-accented salon that seems to effortlessly time-travel between two centuries.
“What I want most is for the audience to have as visceral an experience as possible,” says director Rachel Chavkin. “I want the place to be palpable under the skin. So creating the world of the play and then putting the audience inside that world is a very clear avenue to achieving that goal.”
Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 is the brainchild of Dave Malloy, who took a 70-page fillet from Leo Tolstoy’s epic Russian literary masterpiece War and Peace and turned it into an electro-pop musical. Writing the music, lyrics, and book, Malloy focuses on two parallel stories: the near-calamitous tale of the young, ravishing debutante Natasha (Denée Benton), who falls helplessly in love with a licentious bounder, the dashing Anatole (Lucas Steele), interspersed with the story of Pierre, a schlubby intellectual who is stumbling toward a path of spiritual and emotional fulfilment (played by the multiplatinum recording artist Josh Groban).
Even before he started writing the musical, Malloy had discussed with Chavkin his dream of re-creating a very special experience that he’d had in Moscow. “We were working together on a show up at Vassar College in 2009 and Dave talked about this night when he stumbled into the Café Margarita, where there were these people eating dumplings, drinking vodka, and listening to a pop string trio,” the director recalls. “He found himself sitting at a table right next to the trio and ended up having this intimate relationship with the viola player. He loved it.”
“That was actually the core idea —being inside this Russian café, and the idea of spreading the musicians throughout the room,” Chavkin explains. “And once you take the leap of breaking up where your band is, a series of decisions flow from there: Maybe there’s no stage; then maybe you use the whole room. From there, I thought about what the place actually needed to feel like in order to tell this story. There were two main things. One was opulence. This is an aristocratic society and Tolstoy is very much critiquing that society and their hypocrisy, so it needed to feel rich. There also needed to be a blend of period and contemporary. I felt very strongly that we had to meet the characters on their own terms, which is the period element, and then Dave’s music has this incredibly contemporary element to it with the electronica, so we really needed to be able to do both things.”
At age 35, Chavkin is making quite a splashy debut on Broadway (as indeed are Malloy and most of the talented cast, including Groban). She credits the world of experimental theater with shaping her particular aesthetic. She made her mark directing several acclaimed Off-Broadway productions, including the recent Small Mouth Sounds, which takes place at a healing retreat where the participants mostly observe a rule of silence — the polar opposite of The Great Comet. Chavkin reports that since age 18 she has spent her professional life watching masters of experimental performance style — particularly the avant garde Wooster Group and Elevator Repair Service. “Both those groups take the work seriously but they don’t take themselves too seriously. I find a real matter-of-fact quality in the performance style that is absolutely present in The GreatComet as well,” she notes.
“If you are doing something, you really do it,” the director continues. “In our show, our cast is really running all over the space, creating this incredible energy of exhilaration. At the same time, there’s an acknowledgment that it is a performance. There is a really pleasurable tension between someone saying they are doing something and what they are actually doing,” she says. “One of my favorite moments is when Pierre says, ‘I put my fur coat on my shoulders unable to find the sleeve,’ while he’s putting his arms into a coat. You get the emotional vibe of what that character is going through and the feeling of wonder and dreaminess he’s experienced after his encounter with Natasha, but it doesn’t have to be a literal representation of that.”
Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 first exploded Off-Broadway in the fall of 2012 in the intimate shoebox space at the Ars Nova theatre. It subsequently transferred to two separate pop-up tent spaces in Manhattan the following year, retaining the same immersive dinner-cabaret theater vibe evoked by set designer Mimi Lien in the original. When the show landed at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in December 2015, the creative team reworked the production for the more traditional space and then expanded it further for its Broadway debut at the Imperial Theatre last November. However, the “basic DNA of the show,” as Chavkin puts it, never changed. “But it has just gotten bigger and fancier in every way,” she adds.
While the original production featured just a cast of 10 principals, Chavkin reports that they added a 14-member ensemble for ART, making a total of 24 performers on stage. For Broadway, they increased the ensemble to 20, which choreographer Sam Pinkleton showcases in the big dance number that takes place during the attempted abduction of Natasha in the middle of Act Two. Chavkin is clearly in her element when the action is at its zaniest. “I love it when it feels like it could almost spin off its axis at any moment,” she says enthusiastically.
Of course, the director has complete mastery of the controlled chaos that erupts inside the Imperial Theatre auditorium. “I think very often chaos can be approached like just sloppiness,” Chavkin continues. “This production is quite the opposite, in part because of the sightlines.“ She says that with the help of a team of five others, she spent a lot of time making sure that no member of the audience would lose out because of their vantage point. “It’s the same as staging in the round,” she explains. “You have to have somewhat constant motion, otherwise the audience behind the actor is only getting part of the story. We also wanted there to be an absolute democracy of access,” she adds. “So the people in the very rear get dumplings and get shakers. They get all the stuff that everyone in the more expensive seats in the orchestra receive.”
Beyond the whirling action, the partying and the absurdities of 19th century Moscow haute society that she and composer Malloy orchestrate with flair in Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812, Chavkin’s great hope is that audiences will also be touched by the plights of Natasha and Pierre. “At the end of day, I want them to take away the story of selfishness and grace,” she says. “I love that a woman is at its center, and I think what is most moving is that it is the story of a young woman who charges into this disastrous choice with her eyes open; Natasha is a very active party to her own destruction. And there are these few characters who end up being the quiet heroes of the show — Pierre and Natasha’s cousin Sonya — not because they are equipped but in fact because of the opposite. They are unfit for the task of saving someone and yet they take this leap. I just think that it is remarkably beautiful.”
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Information Collected By/Shared With Third Parties
Other than as provided in this Privacy Policy, we do not share your personal information with third parties.
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When necessary. We may also release personal information when we believe, in good faith, that such release is reasonably necessary to protect the rights, property or safety of Ourselves, Our clients, Our users, or others. We may disclose personal information about you to law enforcement, other government officials, or other third parties, as We, in our sole discretion, believe necessary or appropriate, in connection with an investigation of fraud, intellectual property infringement, or other activity that is illegal or may expose Us to legal liability.
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Co-Branded Pages
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Transactions With Third Party E-commerce Partners, Vendors and Advertisers
When you provide personal information to one of Our Site’s third party e-commerce partners, vendors or advertisers (i.e. Ticketmaster.com, Telecharge.com), this transaction will occur in connection with the site of the e-commerce partner, vendor or advertiser, not on the Site, and, as such, the personal information you provide is collected pursuant to and controlled by the privacy policy of such e-commerce partner, vendor or advertiser. Broadway Direct is not responsible for such parties’ privacy policies and We encourage you to familiarize yourself with the applicable privacy policy of the e-commerce site with which you transact business or to contact the operator of such site for more information.
Delivery of Advertising and Other Content
In addition to ads and content that We may serve you directly, We use third-party advertising companies and marketing services companies to serve ads and other content when you visit Broadway Direct and elsewhere on the internet and in other media. Both We and these companies may use information about your visits to Broadway Direct and elsewhere to serve ads and other content to you. In the course of doing so, a unique third-party cookie may be placed or recognized on your browser by such companies. In addition, We and these companies may use Web beacons to help manage Our online advertising and content. These Web beacons enable Us and the third-party companies to recognize a browser’s cookie when a browser visits this Site and to learn which banner ads bring users to our website and to serve you ads that you may find of interest elsewhere on the internet and in other media. Both Broadway Direct and these companies may use information obtained from your visits to Broadway Direct or other websites, and information received from you offline in order to provide advertisements about goods and services and other content of interest to you across the internet and in other media. If you would like more information about this practice and to know your choices about not having this information used in this manner by Our third party advertising companies, please visit http://www.networkadvertising.org/optout_nonppii.asp and/or www.aboutads.info/choices. European users may opt out of receiving targeted advertising by visiting http://www.youronlinechoices.eu/. In addition, we may provide PII and Anonymous Information to marketing services companies. This may include information we received from you offline or online. These companies may combine information we provide (including PII and Anonymous Information) with personal and anonymous information they may have about you, using cookies they place or that We place on their behalf, as described in the section regarding “Cookies and Tracking Tags”. We require these companies to delete the PII we provide them. These companies may use the resulting non-personal information and such cookies for their own marketing purposes, and they may provide the same to their customers for their customer’s marketing purposes. Some of Our emails may contain tags that allow Us and Our advertisers and other partners to determine the types of content that may be of interest to you. Those tags may contain PII and may be shared with others to the same extent indicated in the section regarding “Cookies and Tracking Tags”. Those tags may not be deleted but you can opt out of receiving the emails.
Use of This Site by Children
The Site is not directed to individuals under the age of thirteen (13), and We request that such individuals do not provide personal information through the Site. If a parent or guardian becomes aware that his or her child has provided Us with PII without the parent or guardian’s consent by, for example, misrepresenting his or her age, that parent or guardian should contact us at [email protected]. If Broadway Direct determines that it has collected personal information of children under the age of 13, Broadway Direct will immediately delete such information and any accounts believed to be held by children under 13. In addition, we may not collect or process information from a citizen of an EU member state under the age of sixteen (16) without such person’s parental consent. If you are a citizen of an EU member state under the age of 16, please tell your parents that you are using the Site and have your parents email Us at [email protected] so that We may delete any information We may have collected about you.
California Visitors
California Civil Code § 1798.83 permits California residents to request information about whether we have disclosed personal information to any third parties for the third parties’ direct marketing purposes. California residents have the right to request in writing: (a) a list of the categories of Personal Information, such as name, email address and mailing address and the type of services provided to the customer that a business has disclosed to third parties (including affiliates that are separate legal entities) during the immediately preceding calendar year for the third parties’ direct marketing purposes and (b) the names and addresses of all such third parties. To make a request, please contact Us at the following email address: [email protected].
EU Visitors
If you are located within the European Union, you should be aware that your personal information will be transferred to the United States, the laws of which may be deemed by the European Union to have inadequate data protection. If you are located in a country outside the United States and voluntarily submit personal information to Us, you thereby consent to the general use of such information as provided in this privacy policy and to the transfer of that information to, and/or storage of that information in, the United States. We transfer Personal Information from the European Economic Area and Switzerland to the USA and other countries, some of which have not been determined by the European Commission to have an adequate level of data protection. Personal Information of EU residents will be transferred in compliance with the requirements of the General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”).
Rights of EU Data Subjects
If you are a resident of the European Union, under the GDPR, European Union residents, as data subjects, have the following rights:
Right to access – This right allows individuals to obtain confirmation as to whether or not personal information concerning him or her is being processed and provide access to such personal information. It also allows individuals to request details of the processing of his or her personal information, including, without limitation, categories of recipients to whom the personal information have been or will be disclosed and purposes of processing.
Right to rectify – This right allows individuals to rectify any inaccurate personal information about him or her.
Right to restrict processing – This right allows individuals to block or suppress processing of personal data under certain circumstances.
Right to be forgotten – This right is also known as the “right to erasure”. It is an individual’s right to have personal data erased or to prevent processing in specific circumstances.
Right of data portability – This right allows individuals to move, copy or transfer personal data from one place to another in a secure manner without interrupting the integrity and usability of the information.
Right to object to processing – This right allows individuals to object to certain types of processing, including direct marketing, profiling and providing for purposes of scientific or historical research and statistics.
An EU resident has the right to access his or her personal data that We hold and to ask that their personal data be corrected or erased and to port their data. An EU resident may also have the right to object to, or request that We restrict certain processing or to withdraw consent previously provided. If you would like to exercise your rights under the GDPR, please contact us at [email protected]. If you are an EU resident and have a concern about our processing of your personal data that we are not able to resolve, you have the right to lodge a complaint with the Data Protection Authority where you reside. For contact details of your relevant local Data Protection Authority, please see http://ec.europa.eu/newsroom/article29/item-detail.cfm?item_id=612080
Security of Your Personal Information
Broadway Direct employs reasonable security measures consistent with standard industry practice, for personal information collected through this Site, including physical, electronic and operational measures to maintain security and prevent unauthorized access. While Broadway Direct takes all appropriate steps to safeguard personal information under Our control, unfortunately, no data transmission over the Internet or method of storing data can be guaranteed to be 100% secure. As such, We cannot guarantee that personal information supplied by users will not be accessed on Our servers, or intercepted while being transmitted to Us over the Internet. We assume no liability for any damages you may suffer as a result of interception, alteration or misuse of information during such transfers.
Retention
We will retain your information for as long as your account or inquiry is active and for a reasonable time thereafter in accordance with Our standard procedures or as necessary to comply with Our legal obligations, to resolve disputes, and to enforce Our agreements. Even if We delete some or all of your Personal Information, We may continue to retain and use aggregate or anonymous data previously collected and/or anonymize or aggregate your Personal Information. Please note that We will not be liable for disclosures of your data due to errors or unauthorized acts of third parties.
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Correct/Update
This website gives users the following options for changing and modifying information previously provided, at any time.
Users can send mail to the following postal address: Broadway Direct 1501 Broadway 14th floor New York, NY 10036
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Successors
In the event that We are, or any component of our operations is, merged with, or is acquired by, another entity, then any such successor or acquiring entity may become the successor to Our obligations with respect to the personal information that you have provided to Us, which would be necessary for the entity to effectively continue our business. By using this website, you consent to any transfer and use of such personal information by an entity assuming control of Our operations as a result of a merger, purchase of assets, or liquidation in bankruptcy or insolvency.
Contact Us
If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, the practices of this website, or your dealings with this website, you can send an email to [email protected]. Our data protection officer can also be contacted at [email protected].