The pithy, one-line character summaries in the opening song of Dave Malloy’s compressed musical of War and Peace take some serious creative liberties with Leo Tolstoy’s four-volume, 15-book, doorstop of a story about love, friendship and life during the Napoleonic wars.
Then again, it saves a lot of time: Natasha is young, Anatole is hot, Pierre is rich and unhappily married. So we are told in the prologue of this loud, heady, modern-yet-period musical, which was staged to acclaim on Broadway in 2016 and is entirely sung through.
