Preludes

Description

From the creators of Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812, PRELUDES is a musical fantasia set in the hypnotized mind of Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff. After the disastrous premiere of his first symphony, the young Rachmaninoff suffers from writer's block. He begins daily sessions with a therapeutic hypnotist, in an effort to overcome depression and return to composing.The piece was well received by the New York press; Ben Brantley in the New York Times wrote Writer's block turns out to be a lot more inspiring than you could ever have imagine and sad and stirring and gloriously fun. In Preludes, Dave Malloy makes beautiful music out of a composer's three years of creative silence...the best musical about art's agonies since Georges Seurat wielded a twitchy paintbrush in Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's Sunday in the Park With George. Mr. Malloy...incorporates wildly diverse sources classical, folk, electro-pop into a form that exists defiantly beyond the quotation marks of postmodernism. He's that rarity, a smart sentimentalist whose self-consciousness about his feelings in no way dilutes them...Along with Fun Home and the soaring, Broadway-bound Hamilton, this smashing production says that the American musical is not only not dead but also growing luxuriantly in places you never expected.