“In 19th century Russia we write letters We write letters We put down in writing What is happening in our minds.”
So writes Dave Malloy, composer/lyricist of Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812. His contemporary glance into the minds of characters from Tolstoy’s War and Peace is wry, ironic, and multi-laminate; it’s a view drawn from careful reading and a vivid sense of humor.
Malloy first read War and Peace while playing piano on a cruise ship, using the book as a way to stay connected to his landbound girlfriend. They would call each other to discuss chapters, hoping that sharing a mental space would make up for their not sharing a geographical one. Malloy loved the novel instantly. He related intimately to the character of Pierre, sharing his baffled sense of wonder at the vastness of the world. For Malloy, the lengthy tome went quickly. “Parts of it read like a trashy romance novel,” he says. “I wanted to adapt it instantly.”
What followed was Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812. Malloy set the Aylmer and Louise Maude 1922 English translation of Tolstoy’s text to music. The score fuses nineteenth century Russian folk tunes and electropop, a genre which uses synthesizers and a variety of other electronic instruments, “The dramaturgical argument for electropop is that it only comes in when Anatole enters,” Malloy explains. “He’s the electricity that shocks Natasha and the story.”
This eclectic musical mashup is in keeping with Malloy’s diverse tastes. He’s inspired by music ranging from Radiohead to Rachmaninoff, from Tchaikovsky to Coltrane. However, he wasn’t always so musically diverse. “In high school, I was only obsessed with jazz,” Malloy explains. “In college, I was only obsessed with classical.” His well-roundedness developed during a job at Amoeba Music in San Francisco. He’d spend hours poking through the records, listening to anything he could get his hands on, “The guys that worked there were musical geniuses of every style, and they thoroughly enhanced my musical education.”
Dave Malloy has lived liberally, and the breadth of his experience has translated into a depth of theatrical intelligence. He has had a huge range of jobs. In addition to cruise ship pianist and record store sales clerk, Malloy has been a preschool teacher, pizza cook, and counselor at a group home for emotionally disturbed children. He’s also an actor and singer, having originated the role of Pierre in the premiere iteration of Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812. Malloy folds the expansiveness of his experience into his creative work—one fuzzy night in Moscow has been layered into this production’s set design. Malloy arranges and orchestrates all of his music, a technical skill and meticulous exercise rarely seen in composers today. In a world of increased specialization, Malloy balks at choosing one job in the theater.
The A.R.T. has staged three of Malloy’s productions over the past four seasons: Beowulf—A Thousand Years of Baggage, Three Pianos, and Ghost Quartet. The most recent, Ghost Quartet, ran at OBERON in September. This concept album performed live weaves together tales of deceased sisters, a subway accident, a broken camera, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the ghost of Thelonious Monk, and many more. When the play ends, the audience lingers in the theater, basking in the glow of the world that has just been created around them. Beowulf—A Thousand Years of Baggage and Three Pianos, also, weave classic texts and compositions with modern day understanding. Beowulf poses the Norse hero against his greatest enemy—academia—and Three Pianos, according to Dave Malloy, “explodes and mayhems” Franz Schubert’s famous Winterreise. What all three share is their love of the works on which they are based.
Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 is in the spirit of Malloy’s other works. It’s wild, modern, and intrinsically Tolstoy—his language, characters, and structure. Malloy transforms a sometimes-intimidating tome into a wild night at a supper club. He explains that he wants a contemporary audience to be able to access the heart of Tolstoy’s work immediately, without having to do any research. He wants to make a modern romance: “The people attending our play aren’t wearing nineteenth-century clothes or speaking in elevated language. They have twenty-first-century mindsets and that must be acknowledged.” At the core of Malloy’s many talents is his avidity as a reader. War and Peace speaks directly to his heart, and Malloy’s creations conjure that same love in his audience.
Tessa Nelson is a second-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T. Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University.
