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Three-Sister Harmony in Find Me Here
Plus an array of short-run summer shows to watch for if they return.
My colleague Jackson McHenry already wrote about Three Houses, the new musical from Dave Malloy, which finds the composer-lyricist expanding on modes and motifs from his gorgeous 2019 meditation on the labyrinth of the internet, Octet — but I’m here to add that I hope this witty, wounded, and wonderful riff on, of all things, the Three Little Pigs gets another stage to play on very soon. COVID has started to creep into plays in ways that finally feel rich and resonant rather than flat and forced, and in Three Houses, Malloy and his frequent collaborator, the director Anne Tippe, create a kind of lonelyhearts cabaret — a space outside of time, infused with the magic and menace of fairytale, in which a trio of misfits can tell us the stories of what happened to them “during the pandemic, when the lockdown hit.” The performances are first-rate (Ching Valdes-Aran is especially wonderful as a series of grandmothers, and Scott Stangland makes a scruffily seductive Big Bad Wolf, in the form of a laid-back bartender). Okay, so this one probably won’t come back, but whether or not its director, the ingenious Isabel Perry, has plans for a revival, her production at the Lenox Hill Neighborhood House of Frank Loesser, Jo Swerling, and Abe Burrows’s Guys and Dolls —starring a cast of 23 senior citizens, aged 66 to 92, from all across New York—deserves a special round of applause.
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