No musical theater composer working at the moment is better equipped to tell a ghost story than Duncan Sheik. While the adjective “haunting” is sometimes used too liberally by critics—present company included—it readily applies to the plots and themes that Sheik has embraced and to his melodies and orchestrations, with their gorgeously spooky and melancholy nuances. In Sheik and Kyle Jarrow’s bleak, beguiling chamber musical Whisper House, two of the seven characters—the ones who open and close the show, and do the most singing in between—address the others, and the audience, from beyond the grave, and they’re among the most alluring and spiteful spirits you’re likely to have encountered.
First recorded as an album in 2009, not long after Sheik had collected his Tony Awards for Spring Awakening, Whisper House had its world premiere at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre the following year. The current production, presented by the Civilians, is the first in New York, and was delayed for nearly two years by COVID—a dilemma not entirely inappropriate for a show in which the living characters seem so isolated and oppressed that you’ll almost agree when the Male Ghost and Female Ghost announce, in the opening number, “They’d all be better off dead.”
There’s Christopher, a young boy sent to live in a remote lighthouse with a paternal aunt he doesn’t know after his father dies in battle during World War II and his mother lands in a mental hospital. The aunt, Lily, is a brittle shut-in with a club foot, whose only regular social contact prior to Christopher’s arrival seems to have been with the local sheriff and a man named Yasuhiro, a Japanese immigrant hired years ago to help her out around the place, whom the sheriff has come to regard with increasing suspicion because of events abroad.
But Christopher quickly becomes aware of two more presences: the Ghosts, who during their lives had been a singing duo, each secretly in love with the other. They met their fate while performing on a yacht that sank just nearby, though the reasons for their apparent plan to wreak revenge on the lighthouse’s inhabitants remain a mystery until the musical’s final moments. Until then, actors Alex Boniello and Molly Hager remain in sinuous motion, their roaring ’20s garb bathed by lighting designers Jorge Arroyo and Jeff Croiter in eerie white. Boniello wields a guitar, but Hager is free to wave her arms and undulate in what can at times seem like a parody of a femme fatale who happens to have been dead for two decades.
Under Steve Cosson’s direction, the air of doom and gloom that duly pervades Whisper House can generally seem overstated at times; it doesn’t help that Jarrow’s book offers only flashes of dry humor—”I have a reputation as a curmudgeon to maintain,” Lily quips at one point—or that the lyrics he co-wrote with Sheik can walk a fine line between artfully direct and obvious. “We’re here to tell you/That all of this is real,” the Ghosts inform Christopher early on, helpfully. “And if you’re terrified today/That’s how you’re supposed to feel.”
Still, the romantic twists informing the musical, which was conceived with Keith Powell, are compelling, and the score is enchanting, with Sheik and Jason Hart’s orchestrations layering piquant horns and clarinet over a spare folk-rock foundation to sumptuously theatrical effect. Alexander Dodge’s stark set design is similarly nuanced, as are Samantha Mathis’s and James Yaegashi’s moving performances as Lily and Yasuhiro. Mathis’s spinster is especially affecting, sustaining her stiff reserve even as she reveals a warm heart, and battles long-repressed emotions on several counts.
Young actor Wyatt Cirbus deftly fields the more transparent woes plaguing Christopher, and Jeb Brown lends a gruff humanity to the sheriff, and also appears briefly as the doctor who tends to Christopher’s mother. In the end, Sheik’s music alone makes you hope that Whisper House will enjoy another life; it has stuck around this long, after all, and a little editing never killed anyone.
Whisper House opened January 20, 2022, at 59E59 and runs through February 6. Tickets and information: 59e59.org
