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In a Pair of Musicals, Gabriel Kahane Seeks America and Himself
He performs ‘Magnificent Bird’ and ‘Book of Travelers’ on alternating nights.
In Magnificent Bird, which is encouraged to be seen as the first act, Kahane describes his experience of trying to detox from the internet, a quest for inner peace and clarity that’s complicated by the fact he embarked on it just before the onset of the COVID pandemic. He’s made a name for himself both as a encyclopedic composer who synthesized the history of Los Angeles by way of real estate in The Ambassador and, as he acknowledges in MagnificentBird, with a series of mini-compositions based on chum of social media, whether tweets from Mitt Romney or Craigslist listings. But while Kahane does labor under familiar tropes here — most of all, the coastal liberal’s combined romanticism of, sense of displacement from, and fear of the heartland — he finds his way through with little observations, like the details of the regular menu and the feeling of being stuck in delays with people with whom you’re intimate and yet not at a station, that complicate and enhance the travelogue.
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