I’d have loved to hear the elevator pitch for Dave Malloy’s massively audacious, massively pretentious musical riff on War and Peace. It covers only 70 of Tolstoy’s 1,400-odd pages, so we have to explain all the characters, Moscow society and the Napoleonic war stuff at the start, okay?
The music is a bit opera, a bit pop, a bit techno, but there’s also a lengthy four-finger piano motif and the Jaws theme in there. We’ll get great singers and sometimes build an overwhelming wall of sound but the lyrics will be through-sung recitative, with lots of exposition and dialogue that rarely rhymes and never scans. Oh, and everyone’s dressed as if they’re off to a Berlin underground club in the Nineties.
