The remarkable set design (by Jon Gourdoine) included several levels and moving furniture pieces. Numbers made use of the aisle space and there was a T-shaped part of the stage that extended into the audience, creating intimacy within the theater. Everything changes when she meets the charming player Anatole (Jared Lee), leading to a clash of emotions, a scandalous affair and a (ruined) elopement scheme.įrom the onset, I noticed that the show efficiently used the theater’s small space. When Natasha arrives in Moscow with her cousin Sonya (Annie Hunt) to stay with godmother Marya (Susan Gundunas), she has to navigate society while remaining faithful to her engagement. Set in the midst of the Napoleonic wars, it follows Pierre (Stephen Guggenheim) - an old man in the depths of existential crisis - and Natasha (Paloma Aisenberg ’23) - a naive-yet-beautiful young girl longing for her away-at-war fiancé Andrey (F. Seeing the show in San Jose was like revisiting an old friend: through effective staging, choreography and overall energy that poured out of each cast member, I walked out with a greater understanding and appreciation for something I have loved for years. It delivers it all with ballads and pop-opera songs that make you bounce in your seat. The piece takes a 70-page sliver of “War and Peace” by Leo Tolstoy and twists it into a two-hour tale of Russian aristocracy and marriage, joy and chaos. “Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812,” written by Dave Malloy, has always been one of my favorite musical theater shows.

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