Three Houses Off-Broadway Reviews

For many, it will be enough compensation that Malloy’s music remains as hypnotic and embracing as ever, performed faultlessly by the cast (especially Seibert) and a busy quartet (violin, cello, French horn, keyboards) under Or Matias’s musical direction. A close-harmony coda, accompanied only by a hurdy-gurdy drone, specifically recalls the a cappella wonders of “Octet” and the hushed beauty of the title song of “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812.” But intermittent gorgeousness is not, for me, a sufficient substitute for substance. What is “Three Houses” trying to say, or have us experience, about living through the pandemic — beyond the usefulness of eight quantities of liquor?

I gained a whole new understanding of “The Three Little Piggies” at the end of Dave Malloy’s latest sing-through musical theater piece, which has a lively score and a gifted cast, but largely falls short of its effort — seemingly inspired by Sondheim’s approach in “Into The Woods” — to say something significant about life during the pandemic. Still, the ending is a revelation.

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.

It’s not that Malloy, the multi-hyphenate creator of works like Natasha, Pierre, & The Great Comet of 1812 (for which he received Tony Award nominations for book, score, and orchestrations) and the a cappella choral-theatrical Octet, is afraid to plunge rawly into the depths of isolation. Rather, Three Houses, in wading through its excesses of ideas and often free-associative images, suggests misleadingly that it has a particular point to make, even a moral to unfurl (after all, the show is loosely based on the fable of “The Three Little Pigs”). But the disparate pieces never bundle into something fully legible, and Malloy’s sinewy music drifts away too wispily to cohere: As drama, this is, perhaps, closest to a house of straw.

Malloy (juggling book, music, lyrics, and orchestrations) produces lovely passages, but dramatic tension and character development is where Three Houses starts to wobble on its foundations and devolves into an allegorical anthology with diminishing returns. Narration and description take up so much text, the action stalls in passive self-regard. Alternating speaking and singing might have been a wiser tactic or tightening each episode by ten minutes. For a writer inspired by loneliness, Molloy should seek out creative company: a book writer, for example, who could help shape his prodigious musical imagination, and push back when he blows too hard.

Just as experiences of the pandemic are gradually subsiding into the recesses of our collective memories, along comes Dave Malloy's latest work, Three Houses, to remind audiences of the feelings of loneliness, the unrelenting sense of isolation, and the existential terrors associated with the lockdown. The musical, now playing at New York's Signature Theatre and for which Malloy supplied the music, lyrics, book, and orchestrations, is notably ambitious, often unwieldy, and periodically sublime. It also draws from the most unlikely of sources: 'The Three Little Pigs.' Make no mistake, though, this post-pandemic musical may have its share of whimsical puppets and fairy-tale magic, but it is not kids' stuff by any means.