NEW YORK, Dec 18 — Josh Groban has sold more than 30 million records, making him a household name all over the world. But when he began talking to the producers and creators behind the Broadway-bound musical Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812, it was clear he’d need to learn a few things.
Sure, he had played Tevye in high school; he had shared his pure, clean baritone at concerts before enormous crowds; and he had done charming cameos in TV series like Ally McBeal and Parks and Recreation. But his theatre education had ended in 1999, when he dropped out of Carnegie Mellon University as a freshman to pursue a recording career. From then on, Broadway had just been a dream.
Could he now act well enough to play Pierre, the unhappy Russian aristocrat who would be onstage for most of the show? Could he adapt his voice, often described as angelic, for a character who was often drunk? He had become a celebrity by being Josh Groban, the euphonious romantic; would he now be willing to become Pierre?
“He was like, ‘What should I read while I’m on tour?,’ and I told him, ‘You can read Meisner on acting, but also read Please Kill Me, the oral history of punk,’” said Rachel Chavkin, the show’s director. “You have to put other people aside for a while, because you’re playing a profoundly ruined man, and there’s nothing sweet about Pierre.”
For Groban — at 35, both winningly self-deprecating and quietly driven — the stretch was risky.
“The time period I had in my life to look like an idiot, and fail, and for no one to see that, came and went when I was 17,” he said. “When you have early success, people are just lying in wait.”
So for months before rehearsals began, the creative team behind The Great Comet and Groban undertook an ambitious joint venture to retrain the superstar — a “boot camp” in the words of the choreographer, Sam Pinkleton.
With Groban as eager student, they set about working on roughing up his voice, strengthening his sense of character and coaxing him to dance. “What does it mean for this incredibly talented human to suddenly be carrying a Broadway musical when he hasn’t done that before?” Pinkleton said. “We left no stone unturned.”
The preparations succeeded. The show, adapted from a brief section of “War and Peace,” is selling strongly. Critics have praised Groban’s performance. (In The New York Times, Charles Isherwood called it “absolutely wonderful.”) And Groban is happy; he was originally contracted through April, but he has just agreed to stay in the show until July. The work, he says, was worth it.
“There’s always been a desire in my own life to be scared again,” he said. “I knew it would shake me up a little bit, and that was exciting to me.”
Getting into character
For a week in March, Groban holed up with Chavkin, the director, to start finding his inner Pierre.
Chavkin, who had directed the earlier, pre-Broadway productions of the show, had only a passing familiarity with Groban. She had never worked with a star of his wattage and had never directed on Broadway. But she had often worked with untrained actors — many of them musicians — and she knew what she had to do.
They met in the upstairs loft at Ars Nova, the Off Broadway theatre that had commissioned the composer Dave Malloy to write The Great Comet five years earlier and then staged the first production. Chavkin made Groban read the libretto, aloud, without singing, while staring into her eyes.
They read it sitting across a table. They read it standing across the kitchen island. They read it while eating.
“If you can be honest saying a line and eating a carrot, then you can do it standing with the storm of 1,200 faces in front of you, because it’s rooted in the real,” she said.
The challenge of being convincing is especially acute in this production, because there is no barrier between audience and cast — the show’s action takes place amid the seats, and the actors, including Groban, are often just inches from the patrons.
“As a pop star, Josh’s whole concert life involves literally being blinded by the spotlight that’s on him,” Chavkin added. “The most concrete thing I could offer is the skill of meeting someone’s eyes as you’re saying language.”
Groban tours nonstop in support of his booming recording career, so the show’s musical director, Or Matias, chased him around the world — from New York to Denver to Los Angeles to Stockholm — to help him master the electro-pop score for this unusual show.
Matias began by studying Groban’s albums — a mix of classic covers and original songs — while Groban memorised the score. Together they worked on tempo and phrasing, with a special emphasis on Dust and Ashes, a challenging six-minute Pierre solo that Malloy had written to take advantage of Groban’s skills.
They wanted to record it as a single, to introduce the musical to Groban’s fans and to promote it to theatre audiences. “It would make a connection between the music he often sends out into the world and our show,” Matias explained.
Matias had already pulled together a 30-person orchestra and recorded the instrumentals in New York; then he and Malloy flew to Stockholm to meet Groban at a recording studio rented from a member of Abba.
The song was released for sale and streaming, and Groban added it to his summer tour. But although it was the song Groban learned first and knew best, it was also the one that required the most work, because Chavkin wanted him to shed what he called the “performance vanity” of the elegant concert rendition and replace it with a more expressive stage version.
Looking the Part
Fun fact about Josh Groban’s costume in The Great Comet: He’s wearing a fat suit.
OK, the show hates calling it that. They refer to it as padding. But whatever it’s called, for every performance the singer must put on a onesie made of athletic mesh and porous foam and covered in nude Lycra that bulks up his stomach, his chest, his hips and his arms.
“Pierre is in bad shape physically — he drinks too much, he talks about his own corpulence, and he’s in ill health,” said the show’s costume designer, Paloma Young. “Josh Groban is in fine shape. We knew we had to go in and modify his body, but we didn’t want it to be comic — I just had to figure out how Josh would look if he put on 60 pounds and wasn’t going to the gym.”
The padding is just one element of the physical transformation Groban goes through for the role. He let his hair and beard grow out. He found a slower walk.
The biggest challenge, it turns out, has been his beard, which not all of his pop fans love.
“The beard is a constant point of contention, and I heard even recently his management team was wanting to clean it up for holiday media appearances, but he shut it down before the question even reached my desk,” Young said with admiration. “He’s really determined to live in Pierre for as long as he’s performing in the production.”
Finding his feet
“I’m the world’s worst dancer,” Groban said. “I have dancephobia.”
That, of course, is a problem for someone with Broadway aspirations.
In June, Pinkleton was given three hours with Groban in the Ars Nova loft for what the choreographer calls a “secret dance session.” Pinkleton asked Groban to run around the room. Then he asked him to start jumping up and down.
“I was just warming him up and doing some dopey exercises, and I’d teach him a little stuff from the show, and from there I could sneakily encourage him to start riffing on his own,” Pinkleton said. “He’s not Britney Spears, but he had a giant sense of humour about it. In the space where somebody else would shut down, he was like, ‘Let’s see what happens if I twirl around and pretend to screw in lightbulbs with my hand.’”
Over the next few months, as the choreographer was working on a raucous 14-minute section of the second act, in which a playboy tries to abduct Natasha so they can elope, he custom-built a dance break for Groban — the one moment in the show when he really lets go. It’s at the end of a three-song scene in which the rest of the cast, decked out in green and red, cuts loose ecstatically, debauchedly, and then violently.
“I get equally embarrassed by it every single night,” he said, “and I think that’s the point.” — The New York Times
