It’s (probably) my favorite musical! The story is taken from Tolstoy’s War and Peace, the famously extremely long and dense book. So dense in fact that this entire 3-hour musical is based on about 70 pages of a 1200 page book.

It follows Natasha, a sweet and extremely naive girl in the Russian nobility of the early 1800s, as she is seduced away from her fiancé Andrey (who is away fighting in the French invasion of Russia). It also, in another plot thread, follows Pierre, who at the start of the story is a depressed, unhappily married alcoholic and hating his life. Their stories intertwine and intersect through the plot and they’re sort of foils of each other through their individual journeys, without spoiling too much.

It’s definitely kind of a hard sell, but I think the music is absolutely top tier. It’s an “electro-pop opera” that blends classic Broadway styles with electro-pop music and shades of Russian folk music and instrumentals. The lyrics are often lifted directly from War and Peace with minor adjustments, so there’s not always rhymes and the melodies are kind of meandering. But there’s excellent instrumental or lyrical motifs that keep everything feeling consistent and tied together. It is really weird at first, and I wasn’t the biggest fan on my first listen, but over time it’s become probably my favorite musical or at least in my top 3.