If Leo Tolstoy can make it to the musical stage — “Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812” — why not Boris Pasternak?
A long-aborning musical version of “Doctor Zhivago,” based on the 1957 Pasternak novel about a love triangle set against the Russian Revolution, will arrive on Broadway this spring. The show received mixed notices when it had a tryout run at San Diego’s La Jolla Playhouse, but after substantial revisions, it reemerged five years later in Australia, where it toured to strong reviews and good box-office.
I saw the La Jolla production and was impressed with Des McAnuff’s sleek direction and the strong score by Lucy Simon (“The Secret Garden”) and lyricists Michael Korie and Amy Powers. The problem was Michael Weller’s libretto, which seemed hamstrung by the challenge of cramming so much event and character into a manageable length. The celebrated 1965 David Lean movie, starring Julie Christie and Omar Sharif, ran three and half hours and the paperback of the classic novel is a doorstop at 600 pages.
According to the reviews in Australia, Weller has wisely chosen to concentrate on the love story rather than the turbulent politics of the era — something which “The Great Comet of 1812” was able to do in adapting a section of Tolstoy’s unwieldy “War and Peace.” The creators of “Les Miserables” also showed that it was not an impossible task to take source material with epic sweep and boil it down to its emotional essence.
In this case, it is about three disparate men in love with the same woman, the beautiful young Lara: Yuri Zhivago, the poet and doctor; the cold-blooded lawyer Viktor Komarovsky; and Pasha Antipov, an idealistic reformer-turned-violent revolutionary. In turn Zhivago is loved by two women, Lara and Tonya, with whom he grew up and eventually married.
While Ivan Hernandez played Zhivago in San Diego, Anthony Warlow assumed the role in the 2011 Australian production and is more than likely to reprise it in New York. Warlow received excellent notices for his Daddy Warbucks in the recent revival of “Annie” and may well finally receive the Tony nomination that eluded him then.
What I most recall about the La Jolla production was its startling beginning. A young woman, Lara, wends her way through a crowded Christmas party for the elite, takes out a gun, and shoots one of its elegantly dressed guests, her lover Komarovsky.
I’m told it no longer opens that way, but it was arguably the first time a musical ever began in such a manner. And it certainly seemed a good portent for the things to come. It’ll be interesting to see how the revised musical can top it.
