Next, gregarious and boyish Henry (Alex Gibson) details his debilitating fixation on Candy Crush in a rollicking pop-country foot-stomper. Jessica (Margo Seibert) is recovering from public shaming after her “white woman goes crazy” video went viral and she became a social-media punch line.
Such an anthology approach can grow predictable or monotonous if the creative team doesn’t invest in each character equally, and change up their theatrical game, but Malloy and his shrewd director, Annie Tippe, find a smart, engaging balance between satiric realism and exuberant theatricality.Īt first, group members unpack their hearts in familiar ways. Octet began as a song cycle for eight voices (working solo and as chorus) and indeed, over the course of its 100-odd minutes each of the attendees gets their say, from warmly reassuring group facilitator Paula (Starr Busby) to fidgety, young first-timer Velma (Kuhoo Verma). Octet depicts one such gathering, a kind of glee club meets twelve-step, the whole thing shrouded in cultish mystery. More specifically, the inner and social lives of eight online addicts who meet in a church basement for a program where they find comfort in each other’s stories-and spiritual harmony singing a cappella hymns. But it’s wordier and more structurally complex than any of those tomes: The Internet. His newest project is not, strictly speaking, literary. The wildly gifted composer-lyricist Dave Malloy likes his source material thick, baggy and potentially untamable: the Old English epic bloodbath Beowulf a character-stuffed chunk of Tolstoy’s War and Peace Melville’s encyclopedic fish fable Moby-Dick (excerpts at the Museum of Natural History July 26 and 27).
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