Musicals return to Riverside Theatre in Iowa City

IOWA CITY — The Great Comet of 1812 didn’t hit the ground, but it’s about to hit the ground running in Riverside Theatre’s new home.

Audience members won’t have to duck and cover their heads, but they will have to cover their nose and mouth, as the cast of “Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812” will be moving throughout the audience and throughout the space from April 22 to May 8.

They’ll be enacting a 70-page section of Tolstoy’s 1869 classic, “War and Peace,” a passage described as “focusing on Natasha’s affair with Anatole and Pierre’s search for meaning in his life.”

This is the musical in which Josh Groban made his Broadway debut as Pierre in 2016, receiving a Tony nomination in the process. The entire show received a dozen 2017 Tony nominations, and won for best scenic design and best lighting design in a musical.

But Riverside Theatre, which is just the third professional troupe to stage the show, is dialing back to its off-Broadway days.

“Part of the excitement of doing this play, is that it premiered in a 100-seat theater,” Adam Knight, Riverside’s producing artistic director, said. “Even though it moved to Broadway and had this middle life where it was (staged outdoors) in the tents, its roots were really off-off Broadway, and so the idea of bringing this musical back to its genesis was very exciting.”

Part of that means scaling back to its original 10 characters. “By the time it got to Broadway, it had an ensemble of 10 plus 10 or 11 principals,” Knight noted, adding that it’s exciting to reclaim “that kind of downtown feel.”

He’s wearing his producer hat for this one, and not directing the show. Frequent Riverside collaborator Christopher Okiishi of Iowa City is stepping into that role. But Knight, who leads the season planning, said the time was right to bring not only this title, but also a musical, back to the Riverside stage.

It would have been “nearly impossible” to have 10 actors and nine musicians in Riverside’s smaller former home on North Gilbert Street, but the dressing rooms weren’t large enough to accommodate that many cast members, Knight pointed out.

“This is a chance for us to flex the capabilities of the (new) space and to bring our audience something very new in this new chapter of Riverside,” he said.

Still, it’s not without risks. The show’s production price tag of $75,000 is double the cost for staging free Shakespeare on the outdoor Festival Stage, and three times the cost of a regular Riverside show, Knight said.

It’s been a decade since the professional troupe presented “Guys on Ice: An Ice Fishing Musical Comedy” in 2012 and “[title of show]” in 2010. Patrick Du Laney of Iowa City got to flex his musical muscles in the latter.

About the show

In “The Great Comet,” he’s tackling music “that is incredibly difficult and incredibly fun,” he said. “The music is really fun and in a different way. It's weird on the ear and hits you wonderfully at the same time.”

Like the off-Broadway productions, Riverside is setting the show in a Russian nightclub. The action takes place during the French invasion of Russia in 1812, and the music blends elements of classical and folk with indie rock and electronic dance beats.

“It’s like if a klezmer band went to a rave, and then the string section of an orchestra kind of showed up,” Okiishi said.

“Yeah, it’s all over the place,” Du Laney noted. “With the occasional pause for a heartfelt, powerful ballad,” Okiishi added.

The characters in the show know each other socially, and are in each other’s lives, Du Laney explained, being friends or distant family members. Many are aristocrats who are able to go out on the town while their country is being invaded during the Napoleonic Wars.

“It’s a very wonderfully gossipy world. ‘Did you hear this? Did you hear this? Have you heard about so-and-so?’ And a lot of the (action) is pushed play by rumor, which the audience gets to be a part of as well, which is exciting,” Du Laney said. “But their paths don't necessarily cross until late in the play, which is wonderful. There are some parallel paths going on.”

The nightclub setting immerses the audience in the action, as well, and is born from a situation in which playwright/composer/lyricist Dave Malloy found himself during a night out with friends in Eastern Europe.

“The composer was reading ‘War and Peace,’ went out with some friends and they took him to this nondescript door,” Okiishi said. “They opened the door, they went down the stairs and suddenly found themselves in this other world that felt a little bit like the Kit Kat Club in ‘Cabaret’ and a little bit like the Russian Tea Room, on an otherwise nondescript street you never would have guessed.

“In his mind, (Malloy) was reading ‘War and Peace’ and imagining what if the people at the nightclub started telling him the story of ‘War and Peace’ as they were being served this meal? And that was the genesis.

“And so we’ve honored that impetus that people have come together to have a group of performers — who are embodying the characters from the novel — come and tell their story while they’re sitting in this casual club-like environment.”

Knight expects audiences to leave “filled with joy and celebration.”

“This story, to me, just brings literature to life. It’s about the full range of human emotions — of love and hope and war,” Knight said. “It’s a play that has interesting relevance now. The first lines of the musical are, ‘There’s war going on.’ Well, there’s a war going on. I think the comparison ends there. The Russia of this play is not Putin’s Russia. That said, some lines read very differently now, given the world that we’re in.

“What’s so interesting about the musical and the novel, and maybe this is something that was part of ‘Eden Prairie,’ too. That in these times of war, life goes on, love affairs still occur, people still go to the opera, letters are written, marriages are made and broken. The human experience exits in many facets. That’s what Tolstoy aimed to capture and that’s what Dave Malloy with this musical captures.”

The Great Comet

So where does the musical’s long title come from?

“I think the outcome and what the exact meaning of the title ‘Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812’ is part of the mystery of the show, much in the same way, for example, (of) the Jane Austen novels,” Okiishi said. “You watch characters sort of go on their own individual romantic journeys, even though they may be intended for something more later in life.

“Similarly, we watch the entanglements of these people and are like, ‘How is this all going to work out, and why is the show titled ‘Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812,’” which is revealed in the very end of the play.”

The comet did exist. According to cometography.com, it was discovered in the night sky on March 25, 1811; reached its brightest point in October; began to fade by January 1812; and was last detected Aug. 17, 1812.

“It was visible. Actually, it was so visible that during the daytime it could be seen,” Okiishi said. “And the next time it is coming — someone in the cast looked it up — is in another 500 years. It is a nearly 800-year-cycle comet, but it’s one of the largest ones ever seen on our planet, and was seen across the world.

“But it prominently first appeared in the nighttime during the war between Russia and France,” Okiishi said.

“Well, there’s also in the book and in the play, this really delicious collision of the very pious and the very debauched,” Du Laney said, “and where those two worlds meet and what that comet means for both of them, because it has great meaning, great potential for a lot of people.“

“And astronomy was at its infancy, so they did not know it was coming,” Okiishi added. “ ... It’s on a trip, which is described as a huge parabola. How often do you have a musical theater song that uses the word parabola?”

The play has been on his radar for a while, and at one point, he and choreographer Leslie Nolte of Iowa City were talking about staging the show at the Englert Theatre. And then the pandemic happened, putting everything on pause.

When Riverside Theatre approached Okiishi about directing the show this season, he contacted Nolte and said, “Let’s join forces with Riverside and make this happen.”

It’s especially meaningful to him “to be able to do a show that really showcases the space in this brand-new theater and wildly different from the other two shows that are starting the season, each being different themselves.”

“Eden Prairie” had the audience in an L-shaped configuration, “The Niceties” seated audiences on either side of the playing space, and with “The Great Comet,” the audience will be on three sides, with additional seating at four cafe tables on the nightclub floor.

“It’s just so exciting,” Knight said. “It’s also our first show in space has that kind of audience proximity. There’s actors weaving in and out between tables. There’s singing happening in the aisles. It’s just going to be an experience that I think Corridor audiences have never had in a musical before.”

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