It’s been only a few years since the Big Bad Wolf of the pandemic huffed and puffed and rattled the foundations of all of our homes. And now composer Dave Malloy, best known for Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812, has produced a quirky chamber musical that taps into our shutdown-era feelings of isolation and the otherworldly magical thinking that that time produced in so many of us.
Director Annie Tippe, working with the design collective dots, has created an almost immersive cocktail lounge setting for the show at Off Broadway’s Signature Theatre — complete with walls of knick-knacks, a sunken living room, and a padded bar where a sly wolfish mixologist (Scott Stangland) shakes up libations for his guests. (Costumer Haydee Zelideth, lighting designer Christopher Bowser, and puppet designer James Ortiz all contribute to an atmosphere that evokes both stylish ’60s/’70s chic as well as a kind of fairy-tale timelessness.) The bartender escorts his three patrons in turn to the mic, and each launches into a rambling musical solo playing on their common experience of going “a little bit crazy living alone in the pandemic.”
Margo Seibert, Mia Pak, and J.D. Mollison take turns sharing their tales, and each offers a variation on a theme marked by striking similarities: Each starts the pandemic suddenly alone (after a death or breakup), plopped into an unfamiliar house, thinking about their grandmothers, and struggling to hold the Wolf at bay in whatever form he takes for them. Seibert’s Susan decamps to her late grandmother’s old home in Latvia, where she smokes weed, drinks a stash of red currant wine, and alphabetizes the hundreds of old books strewn about the place. She also interacts with a Latvian dragon dubbed Pookie (voiced and puppeteered by Pak) that seems to embody her mounting feelings of depression.
Pak’s Sadie, meanwhile, is freshly split from her girlfriend when she retreats to an adobe house in New Mexico and passes her time building a digital version of her grandmother’s house on an Animal Crossing-like game presided over by a badger puppet named Zippy. While Sadie misses human contact, she sinks into an all-too-familiar experience of online obsession where a quick digital fix can turn into 12-plus straight hours of zoned-out clicking. Finally, we meet Mollison’s Beckett, who finds a basement apartment in Brooklyn after splitting from his wife and becomes a depressive recluse who shirks his job, talks to the building’s spider, and cuts himself off from his family (including the grandparents who raised him). His only human contact seems to be the UPS deliveryman supplying the building blocks of his underground fortress of boxes.
Seibert, Pak, and Mollison are fantastic singers, who deliver Malloy’s tricky melodies with precision and impressive tone. And they’ve been handed some vocally challenging material from Malloy, whose last work was a stunning chamber musical called Octet that featured eight-part harmonies delivered a cappella. At one point, Seibert must sing the 26 letters of the alphabet in an ascending scale and then deliver individual letter/notes seemingly at random (“A D G K J J H N M U”). Malloy leans heavily on a lilting form of recitivo that will be familiar to fans of The Great Comet, but his score also hints at modern influences like video-game soundtracks. (The four-person band includes a keyboardist, cellist, violinist, and French horn player.)
While Malloy weaves many fantastical and otherworldly elements into his characters’ yarns, there’s a kind of sameyness built into the stubbornly symmetrical three-part structure that doesn’t lead to any big dramatic or musical payoff. Three Houses is a chamber musical that is more impressive than immersive, seeking admiration rather than deep engagement. In that way, it’s not unlike many a pandemic-era project — a way to pass the time, noodle over some long-postponed ideas and enthusiasms, and clear the mental decks for the deluge of regular life. And perhaps most importantly, to keep the wolf at bay.
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