Voices soar in Hudson Valley Shakespeare’s ‘Octet’

A haunting a cappella musical about digital damage

Screenshots above and below from the chamber choir musical ‘Octet’ at Hudson Valley Shakepeare through September 7.

By DAVID POGUE

Octet playbill

If composer/lyricist Dave Malloy’s musicals have one thing in common, it’s that they’re all based on bizarre concepts. I mean, his show “Preludes” is adapted from the notebooks of Rachmaninoff’s therapist (!). The plot of “Ghost Quartet” is: “A camera breaks and four friends drink across seven centuries.” Even the one Malloy show that made it to Broadway, the 2016 Tony-winning “Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812,” is based on a 70-page chunk of “War and Peace.”

I’ve listened to all of these on Spotify, blown away by Malloy’s weirdness and daring. All of his music sounds new and unconventional, but it’s never so experimental that it’s off-putting. And the best of it carries you to emotional places you barely recognize.

His “Octet,” too, sounds like an unlikely prospect for a musical: A group-therapy meeting for eight internet addicts, performed entirely a cappella — no instruments except for voices, some pitch pipes, and church-basement folding chairs as occasional percussion.

Once I heard the recording of these lush, eight-part harmonies, I mourned having missed “Octet” when it ran Off-Broadway in 2019, where it won the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding New Musical. It’s rarely been produced since. 

But now, in a tremendous stroke of good fortune for Westchesterites, it’s been revived only 40 minutes away: at Hudson Valley Shakespeare, through Sept. 7. 

The HVS theater (the structure) is pure theater (the art form): It’s an open-sided tent with a sandy floor and seats on three sides. You can come early, have a picnic on the lawn, and watch the sun set. In “Octet,” the only set is those chairs — and some brilliant lighting by Marcella Barbeau. And yet, using a wild range of vocal techniques and some imaginative staging, “Octet’s” eight spectacular singers produce something that’s disturbing, hilarious, and crazy entertaining.

There isn’t much plot. Over the course of its 12 musical numbers, we get to know these eight broken people, who are desperately trying to get a handle on what their digital addiction has done to them. 

The gorgeous first number is a sort of hymn that, we gather, opens every meeting of this group. “There was a forest — one time, some time,” they sing (remember, eight-part harmony). The forest represents the time before they became victims of “addiction, obsession/insomnia, depression/and the fear that I’ve wasted too much of my self/on rapid and vapid click-clicks.”

They are here, they say, because “I was OK once; I can be OK again.”

We meet Jessica (Jill Paice), whose life has been destroyed by a “white woman goes crazy” viral video—in which she was the woman. Henry (Gunnar Manchester) is addicted to games, especially candy-themed games, “wasting so much time/on this sweet fluorescent smiling brainrot.” Toby (Luis Quintero) pulls his hoodie back long enough to agonize about the conspiracy theories that consume his thinking.

Ed (Adam Bashian, reprising his role in the original Off-Broadway production) is an incel—an “involuntarily celibate” toxic misogynist. His number is both terrifying and pathetic. Malloy says that many of his lyrics, in this song and others, came from actual posts online. Yeah, he’s been to some very dark places on the very darkest web; do not bring your 9-year-old to this musical.

Mia Pak plays Velma, a first-timer at this group. She steals the show twice. The first time is a three-minute monologue during a coffee break in the meeting, when she flawlessly embodies one of those people who just will not, cannot, shut up once she starts talking about herself. 

The second is near the end, when she sings about how someone she’s met online has soothed her own self-loathing. She sings solo, lovely — no harmonies, no backup. “And I found her, and she found me/In the lonely ugly chaos of the internet.”

That’s the only time the word “internet” is uttered all night, and the first acknowledgment that it may have positive aspects — although, of course, Velma’s pain is not exactly resolved, given that she can spend time with her distant soulmate only on screens.

During the show’s 80 minutes, night falls around the HVS tent. And as these eight characters sing their final hymn, about their hopes of putting away their phones and returning to nature, soft uplighting gradually reveals the trees in the darkness beyond the theater tent — an effect so lovely I almost stopped breathing. The forest is still out there.

On the drive home, my 28-year-old son and I talked about the show’s brilliance and its flaws. We talked about how many Easter eggs and references Malloy has embedded into his lyrics, characters, and songs, most of which the audience will miss. Only by consulting the program, for example, did we learn that each song corresponds to a major card in the tarot deck: Death, the Magician, the Lovers, and so on. Another example: The word octet also refers to the eight bytes that make up one bit of computer data.

We also talked about how miraculous it was that the cast, performing dizzyingly complex vocal arrangements, stayed perfectly in tune and in sync in the absence of a conductor or a band. (Our discovery later that they were listening to a click track in earpieces didn’t mute the miracle by much.)

And we talked about how “Octet” is essentially a song cycle. No relationships develop within the group, and no character develops or evolves much. That’s some missed theatrical opportunity there.

But the most thrilling part was that my son and I were talking about the show at all. All the way home, and again the next morning. 

That’s because “Octet” is — how shall I put this? — not “Oklahoma.” It goes deep. It goes dark. It’s unbelievably brave and different. And both the writing and the performances under the HVS tent will first rivet you, then haunt you, longer than any musical you can remember.

For tickets and more information, visit hvshakespeare.org.