"Natasha, Pierre': A musical "War and Peace'

You might very well wonder, as you slide downtown in the blinding summer heat to lower Manhattan's meat-packing district, what the fuss is all about. There, under the "High Line," they've erected an air-conditioned tent whose entrance is staffed by security agents straight out of your fantasy of the Russian Mafia, complete with accents and headsets.

Inside, you're greeted with a cold blast of Moscow air (thank God) and escorted into a room resembling a cross between a 19th-Century Russian restaurant and a bordello. The red velvet-draped walls are lined with dozens of portraits of Tsars, noblemen and assorted generals. Your six-foot-tall maitre d' (or, more accurately, maitresse, who's model-gorgeous) seats you at one of many small tables decked with gold-fringed lamps.

Stages line either side of the oblong, chandeliered room (one for the four-piece band, one for the action to come), and yet another platform stands at the foot of the room for the percussion section. High on a balcony above it, a string quartet is poised to play.

Napoleonic night club

You open your program to find a detailed chart of the cast of a dozen inter-connected characters. Memorize it quickly, if you haven't read War and Peace"“ because the lights are being lowered, and a three-hour saga/spectacle is about to begin. And presto!"“ welcome to early 19th-Century Moscow and Napoleon's invasion.

Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 is their title for this kitschy hybrid of dinner theater, story-telling, campy night club act, and cartoonlike Classic Comics, based on the great Tolstoy novel. For three hours, a dozen young performers dance and sing their hearts out to a musical score that's called "poperetta" these days (perhaps it should be "rockeretta").

The characters include the chaste and pure Natasha, who awaits her fiancé Andrey's return from the war and meanwhile falls for the roguish Anatole. There's the aristocrat Pierre, who is awakened from his ennui and attempts to saves her from disgrace. If you read the novel in college, you know the rest.

Borscht and vodka

Oh, and did I mention? While you're caught up in the musical melodrama, you're consuming a full three-course dinner, from borscht to bonbons (included in your ticket price), with chicken Kiev and kasha (of sorts) along the way. Of course, the prix fixe includes the obligatory single shot of vodka (mine tasted like 19th-Century water dredged from the Volga.)

The sheer logistics of serving several hundred diners while players swirl about (and sometimes join you at your table) should earn the waiters a round of applause, if not equal billing along with the cast. Suffice it to say, Natasha is this summer's runaway off-Broadway hit.

So what does this three-hour extravaganza add up to, you might ask, aside from a novel night out?

Macbeth in a warehouse

First, I'd say, it's part of an interesting new trend of adapting the classics for film and stage"“ one in which production after production tries to outdo each other in ingenuity, artistic excess and chutzpah. The most notable example, of course, is the Les Misérables"“ first a novel, then a play and now a film, with its soaring score, spectacular staging and flamboyant emotionality.

Or consider the radical adaptations of Punchdrunk, a British site-specific theater company whose modus operandi apparently consists of frightening willing audiences to death. Punchdrunk's Sleep No More— a drastically reductive version of Shakespeare's Macbeth, set in a series of haunted warehouses in New York's Chelsea district— sent me running for my life. The company's newest offering in London— The Drowned Man: A Hollywood Fable, an adaptation of Georg Buchner's Woyzeck set in a faux film studio erected for the occasion next to Paddington Station— is currently spooking eager audiences, too.

The above-mentioned efforts are unapologetically commercial, indulging contemporary audiences' appetite for thrills, chills and occasional spills.

As for adaptations that could be considered "art" (and it's a stretch), that's the purview of the popular Elevator Repair Service, a clever downtown New York theater company that staged Gatz (2010), a seven-hour re-enactment of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby in which every single word of the novel is read. Most recently, the Elevator Repair crew offered The Select, their unique interpretation of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises.

Titillation time

Natasha, Pierre also appears to be part of another trend: "immersive" or experiential theater, exemplified by the above-mentioned Punchdrunk productions. This label describes a theater event in which the audience is completely immersed— and sometimes drowned— in the experience, both physically and psychically. Every sensation is titillated"“ including, in the case of Natasha, Pierre, one's taste buds.

Some immersive theater experiences require audience participation"“ like the disco Imelda Marcos poperetta, Here Lies Love, currently rocking at the Public Theatre, wherein the audience must dance along with the performers non-stop for 90 minutes. No exceptions allowed.

Is our culture so novelty-addicted that every "night out" at the theater must be an innovative experience unlike any other before it? Is our quest for the ultimate, peak theatrical event so insatiable that we disregard content and crave only what's "new" and "hip" and "cool"?

Call me curmudgeonly, but I don't need to be fed, jostled, terrorized, gouged (a reference to ticket prices) or discoed to death to find satisfaction at the theater. And if producers keep on compulsively and recklessly adapting the classics, next time I think I'll stay home and read the novel, even if that means making my own borscht.