After his sold-out engagement of “Monsieur Chopin” at People’s Light last year, Hershey Felder is returning this year with a new piece about another legendary pianist/composer, Sergei Rachmaninoff. I knew little about Chopin’s life before seeing the musical drama and I knew less about Rachmaninoff’s. So naturally, I Googled him. “Rachmaninoff is widely considered one of the finest pianists of his day and, as a composer, one of the last great representatives of Romanticism in Russian classical music.” I also read that he fled Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, when Tsar Nicholas II was killed. I wondered what Felder had created.
“Rachmaninoff and the Tsar” is a memory play of the great Russian composer. But it is not real memory since he is on the edge of death in 1943 and is on heavy drugs. But neither would I call it merely hallucinatory. Felder has created a piece that tries to express Rachmaninoff’s dreams, his thoughts, his regrets, and his life as he tries to come to grips with his life as a composer and his life as a Russian. Though he is in California and has been in the U.S. for 25 years ago, he wrestles with his thoughts with Tsar Nicholas II, assassinated during the Russian Revolution, who he confronts as the reason his life evolved the way it did.
We learn a little of his life. Born in 1873, he was playing the piano by the age of 4. His two older sisters died when he was a child- one from diphtheria, the other from anemia. His father was a gambler and a skirt chaser who deserted the family. Sergei studied music at various institutes. He was a masterful pianist but loved composing even more and at 19 years of age, his works began appearing on many great stages.
We learn all of this because he is telling it to the tsar, on stage with him throughout the play. And then, he lashes out at Nicholas for screwing up Russia so badly that a revolution changed the country and altered Rachmaninoff’s life.
We get a brief history of the Russian Revolution and the tales surrounding Nicholas’s daughter, Anastasia, who turns up a few years after she supposedly died with her father. Is it real? Is any of it real? There is a lot of history. There is also a lot of what Felder thinks Rachmaninoff was feeling when he was unable to compose and he was seriously depressed. It is most creative!
Nicholas is just a foil for Sergei, who blames his lack of productivity on the tsar after fleeing Russia. There is lots of story in this hour and forty-five-minute narration- so much story that I wish there was an act break, so I could digest it all. I felt the same way about his Chopin story. That was a solo show and to be frank, this play didn’t need the presence of another character on stage to tell the story. Nicholas (Jonathan Silvestri) just sat there for so much of the play, listening to Rachmaninoff go on and on.
And lest I forget, this is a musical play. Felder is a fine storyteller, who not only wrote the play and portrayed Sergei Rachmaninoff, but also performed the man’s music. Though I didn’t know the pieces, it was exciting to watch him perform. And my friend Pamela, who accompanied me to the show, told me she was blown away by the music (she knew his music).
Felder is a master storyteller. He is an extraordinary pianist. “Rachmaninoff and the Tsar” will entertain you and educate you at the same time.
“Rachmaninoff and the Tsar” by Hershey Felder at People’s Light, 39 Conestoga Rd., Malvern, PA 19355, 610-644-3500, peopleslight.org Thru September 20, 2026
Philadelphia Theater Reviews by Frank Burd 