Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 at ISF

Or: Luminary

“It’s a complicated Russian novel/ Everyone has nine different names” So sings our introductory chorus to Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 the Adaptation Sensation that swept the Nation in yesteryear and now furls its great multi colored wings by the banks of the Boise River. A 70 page slice of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, the musical cracks open like a sunrise and pours it’s warm, glowing story (plucked from the sweep of the novel yet so perfectly contained within itself) over its audiences ears and down over their toes.

This is perhaps the first time the show has been stage west of the Mississippi. The show, famously bound up in a New York Russian supper club space, living at one with the audience, seemed impossible to detach from its fitted nest. Yet it fits into the bowl of ISF just fine, allowing the ensemble to charge up and down the aisles, and flood to the back of the berm, handing out letters, encouraging song and dance, and making sure that we’re all dialed in to the drama.

The plot centers around Pierre (Alex Syick, famed composer notably accompanying the orchestra on Piano and Accordion, the talented goose) in his quest to reclaim his decent and purpose and Natasha (Jessi Kirtley) who faces an ardent but ultimately ruinous seduction by Anatole (Dan Hoy). Sung through (much of the text taken directly for the 1922 translation by Aylmer and Louise Maude) Great Comet collides multiple characters, striking sparks of anger, lust, and affliction, all electrified by Dave Malloy’s score which booms and arches like a caving glacier.

The stage play is at its height when the full ensemble comes out to play, bouncing along in the troika of Balaga (Boa Wank), or grinding across each other at the opera or the club, in a dash of both modern non-binary finery and Imperial glitz. Though plenty of people take their own time to sparkle, Camille Brooks as the confined Princess Mary shines in her scenes, while Jillian Kates as the nefarious Helene, draws Natasha in a a reverse striptease, sensually piling more clothes and jewels on to her, in a manner both icksome and delightful. Dario Alvarez as Dolokhov the duelist uses his gorgeous voice and expressivity to ground the more villainous portions of the play, while Alexa Lopez as Sonya acts as loyal (not too flightly, not to staid, and is touchingly wretched in “Sonya Alone”) and Jodi Dominick s Maria D. makes off with the show under her arm, as she always does.

Kirtley and Hoy bring out the best in each other, their disastrous romance charged and pricking through the pair of them like spikes. Syick has to go alone, but when he sets to sing, leaping through Pierre’s thoughts like across stepping stones in the river, his voice builds whole cathedrals, resonant and holy. As his eyes sweep across the audience we really feel that he is speaking to us, that we are both but steps away of breaking through the hopelessness and finding … something greater. Syick, literally and figuratively, hits all the right notes, and the production is everything it should be, luminous and fun and breathtaking, all unfolding under the light of the stars.