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Malloy was the mastermind behind the epic and fascinating War and Peace musical, Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812, which somehow effortlessly fused Tolstoy and traditional Russian music with modern musical theatre avant-garde to fashion a work that was both unapologetically in the Les Misérables pop opera school and totally new. And there are obvious flashes of that same adventurousness here, with the way Malloy has woven nearly a dozen Rachmaninoff tunes, with additional contributions from himself and others (including Beethoven and Mussorgsky), into a story about the composer's struggles to overcome writer's block erected in the wake of the disastrous premiere of his first symphony. But for all the intense effort and vivid conception that have clearly gone into this show, which Malloy developed with Rachel Chavkin (who has also directed), the overriding impression you receive is not of a brilliant mind stifled, but one that was given far too much free rein. That would be Malloy and not Rachmaninoff, by the way. To the extent that there's a plot, it's about how Rachmaninoff (Gabriel Ebert) submits himself to the hypnotherapy of Doctor Nikolai Dahl (Eisa Davis), so he break down the barriers that stand in the way of him being his fullest, most expressive self. This is not inherently a meaty subject, as most anyone who's had even a single session of therapy can tell you, even if the central figure summons up a nonstop string of artistic superstars such as Chekhov, Tchaikovsky, and Tolstoy (all of whom are played, dully, by Chris Sarandon).
The various characters who plod about Mimi Lien's inspiration-junkyard set, which contains (among other things) a contemporary kitchen and an opera museum display, do not convey a sense of being adrift on an ocean of endless possibilities, as seems to be the intent—they're stumbling through a thematic wasteland. The second act's opening with Malloy's own rock-infused "Loop," which throws Rachmaninoff and Dahl into a breakneck dance trance as it's unintelligibly narrated in song by Feodor Chaliapin (Joseph Keckler, a superb vocalist), is less inspiring than it is numbing in its misplaced hipness. The several minutes the Tsar spends reciting each and every one of his titles is clearly supposed to be the evening's comic highlight, but is instead irritating and repetitive. And when the hypnosis finally arrives, as intoned by Davis and annoyingly, pretentiously overlit by Bradley King, the roar of anticlimax is deafening. Stripped of such teeming excesses, Preludes might run 80 or 90 minutes rather than its current, bloated two hours (the only break is a five-minute "pause" near the middle), or it might free time to better explore Rachmaninoff's relationship with his first cousin, Natalya, whom he's planning to wed. Nikki M. James (The Book of Mormon), who plays Natalya, gives the most rounded, concrete acting performance, letting us feel how an ostensibly everyday woman is tried and tested in unthinkable ways by the man she loves. Davis's role is underwritten and confusing, but she gives Dahl a much-needed sympathetic sheen that softens the hard scenes in which she (he?) appears. Ebert is fine as the conflicted Rachmaninoff, and projects the antic, excitable nature of a scattered prodigy gone dry. But in his attempts to fuse the disparate parts of this enterprise, he doesn't dig deep enough or become quite real enough—though, to be fair, I'm not sure anyone could. The conceit is simply too unfocused, and its execution too muddled, for an actor to bring it all together. The one person onstage who comes closest is the musical director, Or Matias. His portraying the "playing" Rachmaninoff captures more depth and color than all of Malloy's own writing and songs manage, in no small part because he's both a virtuosic pianist and a thunderous stage presence that assigns full weight to the music that both drives Rachmaninoff and is driving him insane. The competition between the two would be more thrilling fuel if Malloy would let it; as it is, Matias wins in most battles with Ebert despite having almost no lines. Sometimes an artist's creations can speak for themselves. Never is this more clear than when Ebert delivers the closest thing here to a moving speech: a rumination on how the "Prelude in C# Minor" was as much of a curse to Rachmaninoff as a blessing to the rest of the world. Matias plays with such gusto and abandon that he drowns out Ebert's words, until there's hardly anything left to be heard. This sort of mix of transcendent music, marvelous metaphor, and self-indulgent stagecraft is Preludes in a nutshell.
Preludes
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