Writer, actor, and pianist Hershey Felder has several self-penned solo musical plays in his impressive body of work. His newest production, Rachmaninoff and the Tsar, is on its world premiere tour this spring with stops along the west coast — including at the New Vic in Ensemble Theatre Company’s 2024-2025 season. Notably, after more than 6,000 solo performances, Felder (playing Rachmaninoff) will be joined in this play by another actor — Jonathan Silvestri, playing the Tsar.
This look at Rachmaninoff’s life was born from an anecdotal moment from the composer’s final days, high on morphine, dying of cancer. “He was hallucinating, imagining he was playing the piano… playing things in the air and mumbling about history and the tsar,” says Felder, who found the scene to be the perfect inroad to investigate Rachmaninoff’s history, his homeland, and his life under Tsar Nicholas II.
The play takes place in a time of vicious upheaval in Russian culture. Tsar Nicholas II was the last of Russian royalty, murdered by the Bolsheviks in 1917. Rachmaninoff, also of noble birth, escaped Russia, but remained haunted by the loss of his homeland despite complicated feelings on its political turmoil. “He believed in classic Russia and its structure, which he belonged to, but he knew it couldn’t go forward,” says Felder. “He was torn. Then the whole political environment changed. His life was threatened. The Bolsheviks would make you disappear …. The home he believed in being pulled out from beneath his feet was torture for him.”
The intensity of the show is further heightened by Rachmaninoff’s music, which Felder plays throughout the show to support the story’s emotional crescendos. “I’ve always felt this play is about searching for home, and what home means,” says Felder. “How ultimately we find it in our art and our expression.”
See Rachmaninoff and the Tsar at the New Vic April 5-20, with previews April 3-4. See etcsb.org/production/rachmaninoff.
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