A soaring, deeply romantic tune from the upcoming Broadway musical Doctor Zhivago has been released — just in time for Valentine’s Day.
The song Now, sung by Tam Mutu as Yurii Zhivago and Kelli Barrett as his paramour, Lara, can be heard on the show’s website starting on Tuesday. In the duet, the two characters finally reveal their love for each other while reading a fallen soldier’s love letter to his sweetheart.
“It’s a very simple melody,” said Grammy Award winner Lucy Simon, the show’s composer. “Some songs take a really long time to write. This song I wrote instantly. I was given the lyric, I sat down at the piano and there was no doubt this is how it went. That’s one of the great gifts sometimes composers get from the great good spirits.”
The musical of Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak’s Nobel Prize-winning tale of five intertwined lovers during the turbulent years of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and the Russian civil war, starts previews on March 27 at the Broadway Theatre.
It’s directed by two-time Tony winner Des McAnuff, with a book by Academy Award nominee Michael Weller, lyrics by Tony nominee Michael Korie and Emmy Award nominee Amy Powers, and choreography by Tony nominee Kelly Devine.
Simon, who also wrote the music for The Secret Garden, has her own reason Doctor Zhivago is so special to her: Forty-eight years ago, she and her now-husband, David Levine, were living together for about a year when they went to see the film of Doctor Zhivago starring Omar Sharif.
“The next day, he said, ‘Lucy, when do you want to get married?’ I said, ‘I wanted to marry you from the moment I met you. What changed with you?’ He said, ‘Because that idiot Yurii Zhivago let that beautiful woman go out of his life. I’m not going to let that happen to me.’”
They were married three weeks later.
