However, I also got tickets to an "electropop opera" which is based on a section of War and Peace, and that was fucking awesome, so it all evened out.
Frank West, December 29, 2015, 09:47:37 am
Please tell me more
niftynif, December 29, 2015, 09:54:56 am
Okay!
Here's a picture of the stage I saw it at:
(Almost) all the people sitting down in this picture are attendees, not actors. Unfortunately, I sat in the "normal" seats, but there's a bunch of mini-stages up there too, and the cast is constantly walking all around the room, and sometimes addressing various audience members, which is really cool (and makes for some fun gimmicks, like a scene that's supposed to be uncomfortable for the characters being set squeezed between a few audience members).
The music is played throughout, every line is sung, including a lot of narration and description, like "I turn and blush" or "I get into my sleigh", sometimes actually acted out, sometimes not for effect. A lot of the lines are direct from Tolstoy. The genre of the music is also all over the place, there's a bunch of classic Russian music mixed together with newer stuff, but it doesn't feel like it's trying to hard to be "modern", it just feels like they used whatever music was appropriate to the scene.
The whole thing was really fucking good, it sounds really goofy when I describe it, but it doesn't feel that way at all when watching it, in part because it plays around with what it's doing a lot (The opening scene tells introduces all the characters and tells you that it's complicated, because it's based on a huge Russian novel, and you should look up the family tree that's in your program). The run in Boston ends tomorrow, so I guess I can't recommend you go see it, but I guess it's going to have a run on Broadway soon, so I would recommend seeing it there if you can.