Before he was an award-winning, genre-bending innovator of the American theatre, Dave Malloy was a musically inclined kid growing up in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. He spent his early life loving music for the sake of it, for its ability to “bring a tickle and a smile”, as he’s said, with no plans to build a career of it. He went through phases of fascination which included the Beatles, jazz, classical, Bob Dylan, indie rock, Tom Waits, Jimmy Cliff, Patsy Cline, and electronica. After dropping out of his Music Composition graduate school program in 2000, Malloy moved to San Francisco to discover what was next. For eight years, he worked odd jobs while composing, performing, sound designing, and writing in the San Francisco theatre scene. He paid the bills by “playing electro-jazz in shitty clubs” and working at “a record store, a preschool, a home for severely emotionally disturbed youth, a test prep company, and occasional stints on cruise ships.” Going with the flow, Malloy lived between meager paychecks, creating for the joy of it, “eating excellent produce, listening to awesome drum’n’bass music, and reading a lot of Buddhism and Taoism.”
During this time, Malloy started composing for a like-minded and collaborative theatre company called Banana Bag & Bodice that makes experimental musicals and plays. Their journey together began with Malloy composing and sound designing their 2002 show GULAG HA HA, for which he played “junkyard percussion on two fishbowls, three or four harmonicas, a delay pedal and a shitty amp.” In 2008, Malloy collaborated with Banana Bag & Bodice as the composer for Beowulf – A Thousand Years of Baggage, which solidified the beginning of his career as a composer with an interest in experimental adaptation.
In the time since his San Francisco days, Malloy has turned all of those early-career misadventures into his signature eclectic-epic style of composition. He chooses to create pieces based on colossal topics that most would shy away from, which he approaches with whimsy and curiosity. His Tony Award-winning 2016 musical Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 tackled Tolstoy’s War and Peace; his 2015 musical Preludes is set in the mind of Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff; his 2024 chamber musical Three Houses examines the social effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. Amidst these great works is Octet, an expansive examination of mankind’s relationship to the internet.
Octet was first developed and produced Off Broadway by Signature Theatre in May 2019. An instant cult classic, the show extended three times. This musical was the first of Malloy’s Signature Theatre Residency, which included plans for three productions over the course of five years (this timeline seems to have been slightly extended because of the pandemic). The second installment of this residency was Three Houses, which premiered at Signature Theatre in 2024. True to the spirit of Octet as a chronically online show, conspiracies about this work have begun to circulate on Reddit threads: Some Malloy fans speculate that he is creating a loose thematic trilogy of his Signature Theater residency musicals, citing lyrical parallels between Octet and Three Houses and a shared style of chamber music. His third installment of this residency is still in the works, so it will be interesting to see what Malloy next chooses to explore (and if it will involve chamber music).
Additional productions of Octet include Berkeley Repertory Theatre in 2022, and a series of 2025 productions in Chicago, New York, Canada, and Rhode Island. This is the first DC production of any of Dave Malloy’s plays— a long-overdue premiere for a creator who has so much to reflect back to our nation. Audiences will find Octet to be lyrically verbose, with most songs containing musicalized speech. A wide range of musical references form a complex compositional tapestry, full of unexpected turns. This is a truly ensemble-based musical, with equality of expression and connection between characters. And as with so much of his work, Octet is simultaneously infinite and intimate, while keeping Dave Malloy’s signature sense of silliness.
—Michelle Marie Lynch