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.

Stereophonic at the John Golden Theatre

The set for Stereophonic, which recreates a 1970s recording studio, is immaculate. Walking into the Golden, I wasn’t sure what decade the play took place in, but I understood the moment I saw that set. The carpet, the pillows, the big beautiful Cadac G Type console, the sheer brownness of the whole thing, it was all correct.

Stereophonic was dreamt up by playwright David Adjmi and musician Will Butler, and what a fabulous idea for a play this is. The audience is presented with a fly-on-the-wall documentary about the tumultuous and torturous recording of a major 1970s rock album. Think Led Zeppelin or, far more accurately, Fleetwood Mac.

It’s easy to describe this as a play about Fleetwood Mac, but Adjmi has said that he researched dozens of bands and did not consciously choose Fleetwood Mac as his model. It is hard to believe, though I don’t think the man has any reason to fib. That there are so many similarities—three men, two women; three Brits, two Americans; a year-long recording process funded by the largest budget ever given to a band; an insufferable but very good lead guitarist who is newer to the band but drives its music—suggests a sort of carcinization process, as though the Fleetwood Mac constellation were ideal for creating a group of people who can’t stop fucking or fighting or, god help them, making great music.

And boy, that music. The music in Stereophonic is astonishing. If the band’s album were available to purchase, I would have bought it on the spot. Ryan Rumery can be congratulated in advance on his upcoming Tony Award win for Best Sound Design of a Play, but I worry Butler and orchestrator Justin Craig will be overlooked in their respective categories. Stereophonic has the best new music I’ve heard in a theatrical production since The Band’s Visit. It may not be a musical, but let’s not let that stop us from getting carried away.

Not only is the music excellent, the show’s relationship to it is exilarating. Every time the band picked up an instrument, the energy changed. Each performance feels spontaneous, carrying the energy of discovery and creation. I don’t know, I truly don’t know, how the performers do it, night after night. One scene has them attempt to record the song “Masquerade” five or six times in a row. I didn’t mind. The final take was exquisite. The sense of place in this production is strong enough that audience applause after takes felt jarring, but I clapped all the same. It’s good shit, man.

The play itself, the material surrounding the music, is uneven. Adjmi’s script is wondrously funny when it wants to be, a cascading series of jokes effortlessly based in character and situation, but too often it turns to dramatic interactions that carry little weight. The day-to-day matters concerning the band are always compelling. There’s a late interaction between the drummer and guitarist, discussing the band as a whole, during which they don’t mention either female member once. That’s smart.

The problems arise when we’re asked to engage with the lives of the band members outside of the studio. Those moments don’t work because the characters never cohere into compelling individuals. They’re archetypes. The guitarist is a narcissistic control freak with a unique vision. His girlfriend is the more gifted songwriter, despite having no self-confidence. The bass player has substance abuse issues. These aren’t people, they’re stand-ins.

As a result, and despite having numerous enthralling sections, Stereophonic is long. There is at least half an hour that could be cut from this three-hour play, and it would be easy to do it. The characters don’t have arcs. There are precious few through-lines of any substance. The characters change, but in bulletins. The bassist was a louche and then he’s clean. Cool. When’s the next song?

Adjmi has talked in interviews about how he consciously avoided making a musical. The songs here are “just” songs. They’re a vibe, an energy, divorced of what’s going on around them. That could be spun as a significant flaw of the show, particularly given its subject. “What Makes You Think You’re the One?” is so compelling because you can picture Lindsay Buckingham singing it while giving Stevie Nicks a death stare in the booth, and you can tell it pisses him off that she’s ignoring him. This music shouldn’t exist divorced of what’s happening around it, at least not in the dramatic portions of this play.

On the other hand, there’s a stretch at the beginning of Act IV, probably about 15 or 20 minutes long, during which the show becomes an out-and-out comedy centered on the premise, “Can you imagine what it must have been like to be the poor engineers working on Tusk?” Three of the band members, two of whom now cannot stand to be in the same room with one another, are recording vocal overdubs. In between takes, they take potshots at one another that are turned up to 11, so heightened that the interaction has no choice but to serve as comedy. The engineers struggle to maintain peace long enough to get what they need on tape. The singing is magnificent, and everything else drops away each time they start singing. There’s a sense of tragedy in it, and a sense of wonder, that these people who so fully loathe one another can still create this magic. The scene is also hilarious. A masterful stretch of theatre.

My experience of Stereophonic can be summed up by my reactions to two different moments in Act IV. When the drummer told everyone that his wife and kids had left him, I was more or less indifferent. I was sorry for him, sure, but only in the abstract. When the guitarist casually mentioned during a band meeting that they’d cut “Masquerade.” I was absolutely heartbroken. I think I may have even gasped out loud.

Merrily We Roll Along at the Hudson Theatre

I wonder how much time and energy has been put into deconstructing Merrily We Roll Along, Sondheim’s infamous problem child. I wouldn’t be surprised if more ink has been spilt over Merrily than any other show in his canon, and I wonder, I do I do, if any show with so short an original run has received as many revivals. The strangest part of all this is that the general consensus remains the same, forty years later: Merrily We Roll Along does not work.

People love a project, though, and that may account for the show’s enduring popularity among theatre types. It’s also about theatre types, which can’t be discounted. Whatever the reason may be, every five or ten years someone has a high-profile production that “fixes” this unfixable show. The current production, under Maria Friedman’s direction, purports to do exactly that, and the general audience response seems to find it successful.

Imagine if I did? How boring would this be to read?

Merrily is an uncomfortable creation, a musical told in reverse. It tracks the dynamics between three friends—Franklin Shephard, composer; Charley Kingas, playwright; and Mary Flynn, journalist and critic—over the course of 25 years, from about 1980 to 1955. The show opens at a party hosted by Frank, who has recently transitioned from successful theatre composer to successful Hollywood producer. As the show unspools, or spools, or respools, or however you want to put it, events from the past make sense of what we’ve already seen in the future.

It’s a clever idea, one that feels like it should work. That may be another reason why Merrily keeps finding new gasps of life: it is easy to convince yourself that it’s only a few small tweaks away from humming along. Given the creative team involved—Hal Prince as original director, George Furth writing the book, and Sondheim on keys—that’s understandable. Nevertheless, every production leads people back to the same conclusion: everyone is so unlikable when the show starts, it’s impossible to care about them by the end.

I don’t know if that’s the problem. It might be a problem, sure, but I don’t think it’s the problem. There are plenty of unlikeable characters littering the aisles of American theatre, and we don’t bandy that criticism around. I think the issue is more complicated than that. I think Merrily, for all the work the writers put into it, feels kind of lazy.

That is, prima face, an absurd statement. If there are negative words to be associated with Stephen Sondheim, “lazy” ain’t one of ‘em. To clarify, I don’t think the show is lazy. I said it feels lazy, which is not the same thing. Because of its structure, Merrily has no choice but to take shortcuts to try and elicit emotional responses it hasn’t earned. That’s what happens when you show the post before the hoc. Structured as it is, the show is asking for the audience to experience the payoff without first having invested.

The entire score is built around reversing song and reprise. Embittered or warped renditions of songs transform back into their original purity, mirroring the journey of the characters. Look at “Not a Day Goes By,” which, chronologically, is first sung at Frank’s wedding. The song appears again when Beth and Frank get divorced, a fairly traditional use of song and reprise. The song they sang to one another at their wedding is now a lament of the fact that she’ll never stop loving him. 

The problem? We don’t know Beth yet. Her solo performance of “Not a Day Goes By” is the first time we see the character. That’s a heavy song that requires a lot of audience investment to work, but we don’t get that. Instead, it feels maudlin.

Beth is my favorite character in the show. If the whole thing were presented chronologically, I would probably find her performance of “Not a Day Goes By” devastating. As it is, the best I can give you as an audience member is “I trust that the song currently being sung is motivated by something I will understand later,” which puts me at a remove. Musical theatre is all about feeling. That is its primary motivation as an art form. You cannot separate an audience from what’s on stage emotionally like that and expect it to work in the same way.

Another curious side effect of putting things in reverse order, one I wouldn’t have expected: as the final scene pulls everything together, it feels pat. The show ends with Charley and Frank on the rooftop of their new New York apartment building, watching Sputnik fly overhead. During that scene, a few of the show’s biggest dots are connected. We see Charley and Frank become collaborators, and we watch them meet Mary. We also, finally, see the moment Mary falls in love with Frank.

All of these dots that get connected feel cheap, though. The most tragic moment in the show, discovering that a piece of advice Frank cynically gives a young writer in the first scene was taken from a compliment Charley paid Frank in the moment they decided to become collaborators, elicited a laugh from the audience. Somehow, presenting the whole thing backwards turned everything that’s meaningful into a punchline.

The backwards structure makes the show a puzzle, like the similarly-designed Memento. Instead of living in each moment, we are constantly wondering about what happened next [sic.]. Memento is a thriller. Trying to solve the puzzle is part of the fun. Merrily We Roll Along is a tragedy about three friends, success, and ego. These are not the same. I continually found myself thinking about that joke from the pilot of Mad Men, when Don Draper says “It’s not like there’s some magic machine that makes identical copies of things.” Mad Men never made a joke like that again, and for good reason.

Merrily We Roll Along fails for reasons the writers never could have predicted. The current production is very good, but the material is too clever by half. Musical theatre is inherently, and I say this as someone who loves it deeply, a medium for dumb-dumbs. Even at its most intelligent, at its most daring, musical theatre needs to be immediate, something you can entirely lose yourself in. Merrily doesn’t give the audience the space to do that. We’re too busy balancing ledgers and keeping track of questions.

You know, before I saw Merrily We Roll Along, I assumed Mary was the bookwriter in a three-way collaboration. I do think the show would be much better if she were. It would raise the stakes around her, make the dramatic triangle into a real triangle…Hm. Maybe I really can fix it.

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.