“There’s a perverse interest in picking the texts that have a reputation as being boring,” he said. “Well, no: ‘War and Peace’ is an amazing book, and here’s all the reasons why. It’s a trashy romance novel. It’s not this unapproachable academic piece.”

The Broadway production is the fourth for “The Great Comet.” The musical, then billed as an “electropop opera,” was commissioned by, workshopped, and first staged, in 2012, at a risk-embracing Off Broadway nonprofit, Ars Nova, with 87 seats, rented costumes for the actors and Costco pierogies for the audience.

“By the end of the first workshop, I remember thinking, I have no idea what’s going on, but this is going to be incredible,” recalled Jason Eagan, the company’s founding artistic director. (The show was the biggest ever undertaken by Ars Nova, and will be its first ever to transfer to Broadway.)

Mr. Malloy had a strong sense of what he wanted the show to feel like, shaped by two experiences: a boozy night at Chez Poulet, a San Francisco warehouse space where “Beowulf” was performed mid-crowd, with actors staging their fighting among the drinkers; and another at Cafe Margarita, a Moscow bar with an unmarked door where musicians were cheek-by-jowl with shaker-shaking, vodka-swilling diners, so crowded that Mr. Malloy had a viola at his ear.

As collaborators for “The Great Comet,” he enlisted two friends who shared his passion for erasing lines between performers and audiences: Ms. Chavkin, a founder of an experimental theater company called the Team, and Ms. Lien, a college architecture major who had studied painting in Italy before finding her way to set design.

“The goal from the beginning has been remarkably the same: putting the performers in close proximity to the audience members, and putting the audience members in very close proximity to each other, sitting at a table together, drinking vodka and eating bread,” said Ms. Lien, who last year won a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” in part for her work on this show.