🗓️ Friday, Dec. 12-Sunday, Dec. 21, 2025
💰 Tickets $24–$29
📍 Village Theatre’s Hunt Family Theatre: 120 Front St. N, Issaquah
The venerable Village Theatre program KIDSTAGE is a major steppingstone for budding musical theatre professionals. Their public-facing performances showcase stunning talent and expand young people’s understanding of the art form. Their past productions involve some youth program standards (e.g., “Mean Girls,” “Legally Blonde,” “Matilda,” “Bring It On”). But sometimes they pick ones that’ll make you go, “neat!”
Enter “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812,” a funny, ferocious and soaring work of art based on a 70ish-page section of Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.” It was the little show that could, and the eventual Broadway production was a stunner, turning the Imperial Theater into a 360-degree experience that featured dancers up in the balcony, placed much of the audience onstage and had runways winding throughout the orchestra. Frankly, it’s a masterpiece, but it had the misfortune of going up against “Come From Away” and the now-controversial winner “Dear Evan Hansen” at that year’s Tony Awards. But that’s just how the pryanik crumbles.
Playwright/composer Dave Malloy, who also penned the devastatingly beautiful works “Ghost Quartet” and “Octet,” likes to mess around in classic works of literature and musically modernize them. Though “Great Comet” does traffic in traditional Russian folk, it infuses a story of aristocracy and heartbreak with electropop, EDM and punk. It’s a diverse, anything-goes sonic approach that galvanizes the text, and is a challenging work even at the adult level.
But for young actors with something to prove, it could end up being KIDSTAGE’s strongest work in a minute. And I know in my heart they will nail the act two showstopper “Balaga.”
