By way of Three Houses, Dave Malloy, prolific as all-get-out, looks to have uncorked the first post-pandemic musical. Maybe someone else has already done so, but he’s certainly loaded his with heavy bravado. Not that he doesn’t always dispense no end of bravado. He has unstoppably done as much since Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 through to, most recently, Octet.
What about those three tuned-up houses he’s now fashioned with welcome mats? The occupants are Susan (Margo Seibert), Sadie (Mia Pak), and Beckett (J. D. Mollison), who tell the stories of their houses in that order. Funnily enough, their stories are vastly different and yet vastly the same.
How so? The house Susan fills in on is in Latvia. The house Sadie recalls is in Taos. The house Beckett describes is a basement flat he attempts to glorify as a “bachelor pad.” In each of them, an unusual housemate is, respectively, a dragon called Pookie that Pak works, a badger called Zippy that Mollison works, and a spider called Shelob that Seibert works — each supplying the puppet’s voluble voice.
Oh yes, that gadabout Malloy never ceases to be imaginative. What transpires in those disparate houses may differ greatly, but on the other hand, it doesn’t. Susan, Sadie, and Beckett — spinning their tales as solos, sometimes backed up by the other two — all report that when the pandemic struck, they had just left or been left by a significant other. Experiencing dire loneliness, they retreated to the new abode to gain renewed equanimity. Whereupon, each reaches the goal through the help of grandparents (Henry Stram and Ching Valdes-Aran, both doubling from time to time as barroom attendants).
Indeed, the basic set on the thrust arena is a raised upstage bar designed by the currently ubiquitous dots outfit. There and frequently bartending when not showing up as someone more germane to the current action is Wolf (the game Scott Stangland).
The set’s lower portion is given over to the primary acting area, where four musicians are strategically placed at corners — conductor Mona Seyed-Bolorforosh at the piano and organ, violinist Yuko Naito-Gotay, Blair Hamrick on French horn, and cellist Maria Bella Jeffers. Sound designer Nick Kourtides handles all masterfully.
Susan, Sadie, and Beckett take about 30 minutes each to go into mostly sung detail, though there’s some spoken dialog. They carry on about what happened to them when they took shelter from the Covid-19 storm after being deprived of their major relationship. They’re specific about how they came to achieve solace at their grandparents’ behest. And aren’t each of them up to the singing-acting challenge and way beyond it, as directed and choreographed by Annie Tippe?
Itemizing all the individual ins-and-outs may spoil the contents, but there’s a more notable drawback to being more explicit: a predictable similarity about the accounts. Susan unravels her history, losing an SO just as the pandemic hits, beset by loneliness, trying to find comfort in new surroundings, and learning from grandparents.
Got it, but then Sadie and Beckett vouchsafe the same basics, abandonment, loneliness, et cetera. Inevitably, repetition sets in, a sense of haven’t-I-already-heard-this-before, a get-on-with-it-already urge. By the time Beckett is attempting to build a fortress in his squalid bachelor pad, things have become ho-hum.
By the way, there is one reference to a parent but, it seems, no more than one. It would be interesting to know Malloy’s attitude towards parents and parenting demands. Perhaps, though, he’s merely reflecting the typical child’s preference for loving grandparents who aren’t generally required to exercise the control parents more habitually must.
Similarity takes another, possibly more problematic form that could trouble all but the most ardent Dave Malloy partisans. There is an abiding sameness throughout the score, a signature approach to his music. Much of what’s heard gives the impression that he writes the stories first and then sets them jauntily on melodies, on riffs. Although he uses rhymes from time to time, it’s as if when he does, it’s almost accidental.
That may not at all be his method, and much of the listening time, his orchestrations are so sinuous that they beguile. Moreover, occasionally he slips in what could qualify as a discrete song, such as several bars here incorporating the question “Am I a part of the soul of this house?” and another bearing the lyric “Love always leaves you in the end.”
It’s no news that the best composers and lyricists are said to have style, which means that to some extent their work is recognizable for repeated hallmarks. Of lesser composers and lyricists, the assessment is that everything they come up with sounds alike. Maybe Dave Malloy fits his own intriguing category: Everything tends to sound alike and yet everything unmistakably has style.
Three Houses opened May 20, 2024, at Signature Center and runs through June 9. Tickets and information: signaturetheatre.org
