The Eight-Bit Musical

Lives of the Extremely Online, onstage in Octet.

- Sara Holdren

DAVE MALLOY’S extraordinary new chamber-choir musical Octet uses a simple structure to go spelunking into a complex, ominous, continuously exquisite series of caves. He’s taking on the never-sleeping, ever-proliferating “monster” that is the internet, with its infinite rabbit holes and terrifying back alleys. And his nimble, humane investigation into the “addiction, obsession, insomnia, depression … isolation, anxiety,” and—despite it all—possibility of that vast virtual country feels both playful and intensely personal. Malloy himself was at the center of an online rage storm back in 2017 when his musical Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812, a scrappy downtown darling turned Broadway cult favorite, made some controversial casting choices in the face of low ticket sales. Two years later, one of the many exhilarating aspects of Octet is that it shows an artist making lemonade, turning painful experience into intricate, gorgeous music.