The La Jolla Playhouse and its artistic director, Des McAnuff, are no strangers to musicals adapted from great literature. Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn was transformed into the highly successful Big River at the theater; more recently and less successfully, McAnuff helmed the musical version of Bram Stoker's Dracula. Now comes La Jolla's world premiere production of Zhivago.

Playwright Michael Weller and his collaborators, composer Lucy Simon and lyricists Amy Powers and Michael Korie, have crammed almost of all Boris Pasternak's epic novel into a tight, two and a half hour show. The score needs polishing and the characterizations need fleshing out, but McAnuff works his usual stage magic.[...]