6 / 10
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.
6 / 10
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.
Performances are now underway for Dave Malloy's Three Houses, which is now playing at the Signature Theatre through June 9. Read the reviews here!
| Year | Ceremony | Category | Nominee |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | Drama League Awards | OUTSTANDING DIRECTION OF A MUSICAL | Annie Tippe |
| 2025 | Outer Critics Circle Awards | Outstanding Featured Performer in an Off-Broadway Musical | Henry Stram |
