Three Houses at the Signature Theater

Copyright Marc J. Franklin.

“During the pandemic, when the lockdown hit, I had just separated from my girlfriend, and was living on my own in Brooklyn, New York.”

While the specifics change from episode to episode, that’s how each of the three stories in Three Houses, Dave Malloy’s newest musical, begins. The show takes place during an open mic night at a mysterious bar. The bar is obviously not real. As the bartender, Scott Stangland (the only Broadway Pierre I didn’t get a chance to see) emits a sinister ambiance that permeates the theater. Each of the protagonists is compelled to present in turn, and “compelled” is just the word. There’s no indication that this is a choice. “Don’t be scared to dig deep,” Stangland says to each of them before they start, more mocking than encouraging. He knows they will.

The form is similar to Malloy’s previous production at the Signature, Octet, another show in which each character takes a turn to tell their story. Octet takes place at an internet addiction support group, an AA meeting for people hooked on notifications and Instagram feeds. The participants in that group would often share numbers, intertwining their stories when common threads were presented. The separation between sections in Three Houses is much stronger. But for the unifying elements and ensemble support between the three leads, Three Houses is divided into three fully individual extended sequences. When Susan (Margo Seibert) started singing, I had no idea she’d still be singing half an hour later.

I have to confess, when she began her monologue by mentioning the pandemic, I let out a (quiet) sigh. I didn’t know Three Houses was going to be a Pandemic Show. I have an instinctive distrust of anything that tackles COVID-19 explicitly. It feels too recent, and most of the things written about it too flat. “Oh, you were miserable? Cool.” “Oh, you found meaning in enduring those difficult times? Neat.” Fair or not, I couldn’t tell you. My distaste operates at a level below metacognition, in the realm of reflexive hostility. My general position is that most great art about COVID-19 will never call COVID by its name. It will be inferred, subtextual, a vibe.

Three Houses gets away with it because the show isn’t about the pandemic. The pandemic is very important to what’s happening on stage, and certainly important to my thoughts on the show, but it recedes to an ambience most of the time. COVID-19 is why these people are holed up. COVID-19 is why we watch them lose themselves in their obsessions.

If there’s one thing Malloy loves, it’s an obsession. He is compelled by and, it seems pretty clear, terrified of them. Octet is entirely about the compulsions of technology. Moby Dick is, well, we all know what Moby Dick is about. Even Great Comet can be looked at as an interlocking series of obsessions, a group of people consumed by their passions and their ideas. The obsessive moments of Three Houses fit comfortably within Malloy’s corpus, rendered, as ever, with humor and horrible understanding.

Susan is holed up in her late grandmama’s Latvian house. She smokes pot, drinks mulberry wine, and reorganizes her grandmother’s library. Her preoccupations are harmless enough, all things considered, though her recitation of her grandmother’s extensive collection has the edge of compulsion.

Sadie (Mia Pak) loses herself in a Sims-like video game, playing 14 hours a day. During what is probably the show’s highpoint, she recounts a childhood episode at the carnival, when she fed quarter after quarter into an arcade machine. “Quarter in. Roll. Click. Push, push, push, push, push, push,” Sadie repeats over and over, faster and faster, until the quarters have run out. “What happened? Where did I go?” That is a quintessential Malloy lyric. His work suggests that obsessions and compulsions are to be feared because of how they supersede our selves.

Beckett (J.D. Mollison) has the roughest go of it. His segment is when COVID-19 is most present, most suffocating. He completely cuts himself off from the outside world, choosing instead to box himself in. Literally. He orders compulsively from the internet. He names the spider that lives in the corner of the living room. He loses his grandparents to COVID, misses his sister’s “small outdoor” wedding, and loses his job due to poor performance.

If that setup works for all three protagonists, it can work for me, right? During the pandemic, when the lockdown hit, I had just separated from my girlfriend, and was living on my own in Brooklyn, New York. Like Susan, Sadie, and Beckett, I had just gotten out of a relationship when the pandemic hit. I too spent the early pandemic alone, my roommates cast to the far corners of Brooklyn while I stayed in the center. I bought and played and thought about board games. It got to the point where they were all I could think about, even though I myself was sick of them. It’s a strange thing, to have obsessive thoughts that you yourself are aware of as obsessive. It was a mania, and the only way through that I could find.

That behavior receded with time, thank god. Other things have hung around, though. After months of solitude, thinking about a Finnish man she met during her travels, Susan says, “I think he was the last person I touched.” I was alone for 76 days, and I have no idea who the last person I touched was. It feels like such an important thing. It might have been my roommate Sam, the last person to leave. It might have been the woman I went out on a date with the Monday before I decided I wasn’t leaving the apartment again. I don’t know. What I do know, as I contemplate that question, is that I cannot be alone anymore.

Three Houses is about isolation, obsession, and fear. Like all of Dave Malloy’s creations, it is funny, breathless, and discursive in extremis. The show is unified by the idea of the Three Little Pigs and the Big Bad Wolf, which feels neither wholly successful nor wholly necessary. I can’t tell what he is. Is he the things we avoid confronting in our lives? Is he death? Is he both? What does it mean to dance with him, as all three protagonists ultimately do? I don’t know, and I’m not sure the show knows either. That’s alright. There are worse things than having too many ideas.

The Notebook at the Schoenfeld Theatre

It is worth acknowledging from the jump what many of you, my dear and indulging friends, suspect: my expectations for a Broadway adaptation of The Notebook (a movie I do not particularly like) with music from Ingrid Michaelson (a singer-songwriter whose work I do not particularly enjoy) were not, well, they weren’t particularly high. I was mostly interested in seeing it to celebrate a former collaborator, Jordan Tyson, who’s making her Broadway debut as Younger Allie. 

When my parents announced they were coming to town, I knew just the show to recommend. Everything about the idea of a Broadway adaptation of The Notebook that caused me to approach it with eyebrow arched also makes it ideal My Parents Are Coming to the City material. And it is. The Notebook is indeed perfect fodder for the MPACttC crowd. That’s a backhanded compliment in many cases, but The Notebook also happens to be good.

I was more or less instantly charmed. Given the cast, I should have known. It’s hard to watch Dorian Harewood and not be charmed. Harewood, who plays Older Noah, and Maryann Plunkett (Older Allie) are both great actors, and it is a joy to watch them. The contemporary portions of The Notebook are set in the nursing home where Older Allie receives live-in care for advanced Alzheimer’s. Plunkett is remarkable, and exhausting to watch. I mean that as a compliment. I don’t know how she gives that performance eight times a week. It must be physically exhausting. Her Tony nomination is richly deserved.

I assume you know the story. So does the show, come to think of it. There are no attempts to couch anything in a twist, no reveals that a lesser adaptation might try to milk. We find things out as they happen. Perfect. Older Noah reads to Older Allie, his wife, from a mysterious notebook. We “learn” after a little while that the contents of the notebook are their story. I remember that being a bit more of a reveal in the movie version, but here the staging makes that more or less apparent from the start. Again, that’s fine. The Notebook isn’t interested in hiding that from you. The ultimate revelation about the notebook—if you know, you know—still hits, and it hits like a fucking truck.

The most interesting and inspired choice The Notebook makes is dividing both Allie and Noah into three flavors: Younger, Middle, and Older. Prior to seeing the show, I assumed that was a concession born out of practicality. I thought the show might jump back and forth too frequently to allow for aging or de-aging, whether through makeup or quick changes. Instead, the leads in triplicate are part of the conceptual fabric. Even if the idea started as a matter of practicality, the creative team has turned it into an inspired choice. The three eras don’t interact with one another, by which I mean they do not speak to one another, but they do create echoes. The various ages sing together, and spend much of the show on stage simultaneously.

Directors Michael Greif and Schele Williams make smart, tasteful use of the conceit. They never lean on it. This is a shockingly unsentimental show given what it could have been. One of my favorite moments, which comes during the absolutely tear-drenched finale—I have cried that hard in a theater only twice before—is when the Allies and Noahs kiss. The Olders are towards the back, the Middles in the middle, and the Youngers are right out front. It passed quickly, a moment content to be only an instant (treat the moment present as a present for the moment, indeed) and everyone goes their separate ways in the staging. That idea, that we are all of the versions of ourselves at any one moment, that to love someone is to love who you have been together and who you are and who you will be, it’s beautiful. I’m tearing up now thinking about it. The Notebook didn’t need to be this thoughtful.

I also have nothing but compliments for the book, which is sharp, funny, and expedient (Bekah Brunstetter earned that Tony nomination). The songs are where The Notebook struggles most. Individually, they are enjoyable, but as a score, they smear together. None of them make an impression, even if none of them offend. They are too similar. Joy Woods, who is phenomenal as Middle Allie, singlehandedly turns “My Days” into a great 11 o’clock number, but that was the only time I found myself getting lost in the music. The odd lyric jumps out here and there—Older Allie’s “I am in love with all of the things I forget” is wondrous—but there’s little to grab onto. With a better score, The Notebook might have a chance at entering the pantheon. I’m sure it will do just fine in any case.

One final thought before I go. In The Notebook, we get to see Harewood and Plunkett do something we don’t often get to see great older actors do: be people who are old. That phrasing is intentionally belabored. They aren’t playing Old People. Older Allie and Older Noah aren’t sagacious grandparents. Nor are they there to reflect on the younger characters around them. Though it would have assuredly wrecked me, The Notebook features nothing like Light in the Piazza’s “Let’s Walk,” a song about the passage of time framed around the behavior of The Kids These Days, and that’s as it should be. Allie and Noah are the narrative, in all three eras we see depicted. The Notebook gives equal time and weight and dignity to their experiences near the end of their lives as it does to those nearer the beginning. Older Noah’s flirtation with Older Allie is given the same energy as Younger with Younger. That is a kindness we do not normally see afforded in popular entertainment. I looked over at one point to notice my parents quietly holding hands. Who knows what memories they were sharing in that moment.

Into the Woods at the St. James Theatre

This piece was originally written in the fall of 2022.

I’ve had the good fortune to see the current Broadway production of Into the Woods twice now, once at Encores! and once at the St. James last night. To say that the reception has been positive would be an understatement. “Euphoric” would probably be an understatement. The ovation the audience gives the fully-assembled cast at the top of the show competes in my memory only with the applause that greeted Lin-Manuel Miranda’s entrance at the top of Hamilton back in 2016.

It’s easy to understand the excitement. Into the Woods is uniquely beloved amongst musicals, thanks in large part to its ubiquity in high schools, and the ready availability of a filmed performance of the original Broadway production. It’s been ten years since the show was seen in New York City, and twenty since it was last on Broadway. The audience was ready.

The cast, too, seems to have been ready. You can feel love for the material undulate off the stage. In both performances, Sara Bareilles in particular gave off a sense of being thrilled just to be doing this. It was readily apparent at Encores! that Heather Headley, Gavin Creel, David Patrick Kelly, Annie Golden and Julia Lester all love the show. It was also readily apparent, as it always is, that Neil Patrick Harris loves an audience.

At both Encores! and the St. James, I got the feeling that I wasn’t watching a production of Into the Woods so much as I was watching a production of a production of Into the Woods. The energy suggested the March sisters performing Jo’s plays in the attic. That kind of joy in the material is infectious, and I wish we saw more of it in professional theatre. With this material, though, that approach is a double-edged sword. Everyone is having too good a time to be thoughtful. The audience and the performers were so obviously in love with the material already that none of them seemed terribly concerned with doing the work to embody what makes it great.

With a show like Fiddler on the Roof, say, that wouldn’t be a problem. Get me a cast and an audience that loves the material in Fiddler and I’m going to have a great night. Into the Woods is different. It is a messier, trickier creature. Its themes are subtler, and the fluctuations in its moods will get away from you if you don’t work very hard to pin them down.

Not only does this production fail to offer any substantive work as far as the themes are concerned, worse than that, this is Into the Woods as vaudeville. This is a first-class production of Into the Woods directed as though it were the school version that omits the second act. It’s all comedy, no contemplation. Not that Into the Woods isn’t written to be funny; the show is filled with space for comedy, with lines that can be milked for laughs as much or as little as the actors want. Director Lear deBessonet appears to have told everyone to milk the show dry as Milky White.

This makes the first act a breeze, but the second crumbles into dust. Into the Woods is based on classic fairytales like Jack and the Beanstalk, Rapunzel, and Cinderella. The first act, which more or less depicts these fairytales unchanged, is followed by a second act that interrogates the assumptions at the heart of those stories. What if you escape the tower and your mother, but the world really is dangerous and unpredictable? What if life with Prince Charming isn’t all you expected? Was Jack right to take from the giant?

Without deep and sincere character work in the first act, which is the egg that holds this bake together, the audience has nothing to hold onto when the tempo and mood suddenly shift. The darker and more thoughtful turn taken by the second act is so ill-served by the choices here that I found myself wondering during the Encores! performance if “No One Is Alone” makes any sense as a song. It was unmoored from any dramaturgical sense of place.

Though most of the major issues persist, the Broadway production is a marked improvement. The production itself hasn’t changed at all, but the cast has. Phillipa Soo was magnificent as Cinderella. She brought a subtlety to “On the Steps of the Palace” that most of the first act lacked. Brian d’Arcy James, as dependable a leading man as you can get, made sure that the Baker is a coherent individual rather than a series of laugh lines. When their rendition of “No One Is Alone” started, from the moment Soo’s phrasing choices crystalized on “Mother cannot guide you,” it was a revelation.

D’Arcy James and Soo are such experienced, thoughtful actors that they are able to push against the limitations of what the production is asking. They can feel in their bones what the show is meant to be, and they instinctually steer it in that direction. My greatest disappointment in all of this may be that the two of them were not in the production their performances deserve. That would be worth all this euphoria and then some.

I find myself thinking again and again about what the reviews and audience response would be like if this had been the first-ever production of Into the Woods. Rest assured that the reviews would be nowhere near as kind. They’d fall more in line with the gentleman I overheard leaving the St. James, who said “I loved the first act but the second act was kinda…” If this were the show’s debut, it would have almost immediately vanished into obscurity. What I saw a month ago at Encores! and last night at the St. James was a good musical comedy with a messy second act. Lord knows we have enough of those. Into the Woods is, as both the cast and the audience know, so much more than that.