I'm curious how this material adapts. Even more than the book, in the film Yuri is so passive, so reactionary (in more ways than one), so devoid of the sort of drive that a major protagonist needs to push a musical. The witness-to-the-revolution aspect is hard to get inside. Sharif was memorable for liquid eyes in close-ups, and of course, the Lean film was stunning visually. But the story (one I was besotted with at age 13) is without a single moment of levity. "Les Miz" it isn't, and its epic sweep is circumstantial; the characters don't create the story movement. Yet there is a triangle, a very "Camelot" esque one (i.e. we like all three people) and if the songs are good, the milieu is a fresh one. It cries out for something semi-operatic, doesn't it?
"I'm a comedian, but in my spare time, things bother me." Garry Shandling