BWW Reviews: Malloy's PRELUDES Doesn't Lead To Very Much

Alexander Glazunov was noticeably drunk that 1897 night in St. Petersburg when he conducted the premiere of 24-year-old wunderkind Sergei Rachmaninoff's Symphony No. 1 in D minor, but even so the piece itself was torn apart by critics and the public alike.

So the young composer who had burst onto the scene four years earlier with his wildly popular Prelude in C-sharp minor fell into a three year funk and was in danger of becoming a one-hit wonder before hypnotherapy treatments with psychologist Nikolai Dahl helped snap him out of his writer's block.

This curious tidbit of music history serves as inspiration for playwright/composer/lyricist Dave Malloy's abstract theatre piece, Preludes.

As with their popular previous collaboration, Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812, Malloy and director Rachel Chavkin are less interested in historical accuracy as they are in riffing on their subject with a contemporary edge. Mimi Lien's sprawling set is a thick clutter of furnishings from various eras in various states of disarray, costume designer Paloma Young dresses the company in modern styles that suggest the 1900 Moscow setting and when the evening delves into the further reaches of Rachmaninoff's subconscious, synthesizer players Wiley DeWeese and Emily Marshall kick into high gear.

The resulting collage of scenes and musical moments (a combination of Rachmaninoff's compositions, Malloy's own music and lyrics and songs suggested by the former's work) has its grand flourishes and interesting observations, but there's rarely a sense that it's going anywhere.

Rachmaninoff is silently portrayed by pianist Or Matias, who plays the score from a center-stage grand, but the acting chores are assigned to Gabriel Ebert, listed as playing "Rach." Responding to Dahl's calm, inquisitive treatment (Eisa Davis, a black woman, plays the white doctor), Ebert empathetically vents the young artist's frustration, his best moments coming from monologues where he reveals his fear that he's never compose anything as good as his prelude and where he considers the insignificance of his role as an artist compared with everyday people who contribute much more to society.

Spoken scenes tend to outshine Malloy's conversational songs, particularly when Rach and his first cousin Natalya (Nikki M. James as his supportive love) must get special permission from the tsar to marry. Her explanation of the intimate connection they felt as children while playing a Beethoven four hand piece is a lovely moment.

Chris Sarandon gives amusing performances as Tsar Nicholas II and as the upper echelon of Russian artistic figures Rach wishes to be a part of: Chekhov, Tchaikovsky, Tolstoy and Glazunov. Joseph Keckler is great fun as Rach's opera star buddy, Feodor Chaliapin, who adores his own celebrity.

Clocking in at over two hours, with a five-minute pause instead of a full intermission, Preludes seems overstuffed with non-specific dreamscape, particularly during a lengthy therapy session at the finish. Though direct storytelling is obviously not the author's aim, Preludes' moments of clarity are its most engaging features.

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