IU Theatre & Dance Presents NATASHA, PIERRE, AND THE GREAT COMET OF 1812 By Dave Malloy

IU Theatre & Dance continues its epic 2022/2023 theater season with Dave Malloy's magnificent Tony Award-winning musical Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812.

Based on a scandalous slice of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, this electropop opera gives musical flair to this classic work of literature. Young and impulsive, Natasha Rostova arrives in Moscow to await the return of her fiancé from the front lines.

When she falls under the spell of the roguish Anatole, it is up to Pierre, a family friend in the middle of an existential crisis, to pick up the pieces of her shattered reputation. Following a critically exalted premiere at Ars Nova in New York City, a subsequent Off-Broadway transfer, and an acclaimed run on Broadway, this award-winning musical expands the possibilities for the genre with its daring score and bold storytelling.

For more information and dramaturgy on the show, please visit: https://theatre.indiana.edu/on-stage/productions/2022-2023/dramaturgy/great-comet.html

The creative team for Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 includes faculty members Richard Roland (Director), Ray Fellman (Music Director), and Lauren Haughton Gillis (Choreographer), M.F.A. students Chris Mills (Dramaturg), Maggie Jackson (Scenic Designer), Brittany Staudacher (Costume Designer), Corey Goulden-Naitove (Lighting Designer), and undergraduate Sound Designer Abigail Hughes. Mills', Staudacher's, and Goulden-Naitove's work on this production is in partial fulfillment of their M.F.A. theses.

The stage management team includes Connor Vincek (Calling Stage Manager), Madeline Horne (Assistant Stage Manager), Sarah Mansfield (Assistant Stage Manager).

The cast of Natasha, Pierre... includes B.F.A. Musical Theatre students Tiana Williams as Natasha and Jacob Jackson as Pierre who are joined by fellow students Jeremy Clark as Bolkonsky, Kabir Gandhi as Anatole, Kate Glaser as Marya, AJ Huq as Mary, Luke Swaller as Balaga, Justin Tidd as Dolokhov, Evan Vaughan as Andrey, Katie Wheeler as Sonya, and Hannah Zeldin as Helene; with Cat Barker, Isabel Barredo, Mackenzie Bunzel-Hardie, Gracie Harrison, Jaden Holtschlag, Hannah Kulawiak, Devin McDuffy, Marco Molldrem, Shane Stoltz, and Mikayla White rounding out the ensemble.

The musical's writer Dave Malloy is a composer, orchestrator, and performer. He has written fourteen musicals, including Moby-Dick, a four-part musical reckoning with Melville's classic novel; Octet, a chamber choir musical about internet addiction; Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812, an electropop opera based on a slice of Tolstoy's War & Peace (12 Tony nominations, including Best Musical, Score, Book, and Orchestrations); Ghost Quartet, a song cycle about love, death, and whiskey; Little Bunny Foo Foo, a forest entertainment for small people; Three Pianos, a drunken romp through Schubert's "Winterreise"; Beowulf-A Thousand Years of Baggage, an anti-academia rock opera; and Clown Bible, Genesis to Revelation told through clowns. He has won two Obie Awards, a Smithsonian Ingenuity Award, a Theater World Award, the Richard Rodgers Award, an ASCAP New Horizons Award, and a Jonathan Larson Grant, and has been a MacDowell fellow and Composer-in-Residence at Ars Nova and the Signature Theatre.

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