THEATER

The McKittrick Hotel
Ghost Quartet

I cannot explain this performance and give it justice.  There were four singers and musicians who performed a song cycle about death and ghosts.  Fifteen minutes of the show was in complete darkness.  There was a point in the show in which the performers passed out bottles of Bourbon and glasses and encouraged everyone to drink up.

The New York Times gave it "The Critics' Pick."

It was creative, shocking, alarming, pretty, and fun.

There was a full time piano, a full time cello, and then various other instruments throughout the performance.

Read the NYTs review by its theater critic, Ben Brantley, and see if it can can relay some of what the evening was about.


A visual preview...

THEATER | THEATER REVIEW

The Finest of Dead People

Dave Malloy's ‘Ghost Quartet’ at the Bushwick Starr

NYT Critics’ Pick

By BEN BRANTLEYOCT. 9, 2014

Spirits rise in all sorts of ways in “Ghost Quartet,” a rapturous little show that asks the musical question: “If you could be any kind of dead person, what kind of dead person would you be?”

After due consideration of assorted supernatural species, including the currently in-vogue zombies and vampires, the answer arrives in soaring song in this four-person production, which opened on Wednesday night at the Bushwick Starr in Brooklyn. One would only want to be a ghost, of course, the kind that goes “hoo, hoo, hoo” all night.

To say that’s what “Ghost Quartet” does is a more or less accurate but far from complete description of its inebriating effect. Written and composed by Dave Malloy — the rollicking talent behind the hit Off Broadway popera “Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812” — this happily haunted song cycle speaks in many styles.

The voguish term “mash-up” doesn’t begin to capture its breadth or its quirky sincerity. Performed by four singer-musicians (including Mr. Malloy, at the piano), “Ghost Quartet” uses languages as varied as gospel, folk ballads, honky-tonk anthems of heartbreak, electropop, doo-wop and jazz à la Thelonious Monk. These tongues are given voice by instruments that include the cello, dulcimer, metallophone, erhu, Celtic harp, autoharp and pretty much every form of percussion available.

As for its plot, well, after a while, you’ll stop trying to disentangle its threads and sources. (James Harrison Monaco is the dramaturge.) Among the works cribbed from and made reference to are the “Arabian Nights”; the Japanese Noh drama “Matsukaze”; Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”; the animated movie “Frozen”; Grimmsian fairy tales; grisly urban legends; and 19th-century broadsheet songs that wailed about bloody murders and their otherworldly aftermaths.

Mr. Malloy finds more than one common denominator in these disparate strands, which are entwined as intricately as the melody lines in close harmony. Many of the stories cited involve dead sisters, for one thing. But most important, they all address our irresistible urge to scare and tease ourselves with meandering tales from the crypt, preferably in the company of good friends and strong drink.

Both are made available during “Ghost Quartet,” which has been directed with unobtrusive cunning by Annie Tippe. The small upstairs space that is the Bushwick Starr has been transformed into a cozy many-carpeted parlor, just the sort of place you might choose to hunker down for a long chin wag on a wet, dark night.

No matter where you’re seated, you’ll be in proximity to the cast: the ursine Mr. Malloy, Brent Arnold, Brittain Ashford and the brandy-voiced Gelsey Bell. (Ms. Ashford and Ms. Bell both appeared in “Natasha, Pierre.”) They, in turn, will be happy to introduce you to their “Four Friends.” That’s the title of a song that hymns the warming comfort of four different labels of whiskey, to which audience members are encouraged to help themselves.

You may well find intoxicant enough, though, in the narrative and musical sweep of “Ghost Quartet,” which is to be released as an album via the website indiegogo.com. (The show’s numbers are identified by their track and side numbers.) This very live incarnation is performed without intermission and takes place partly — be warned — in near-total darkness.

Sure, on occasion the whimsy threatens to thicken to the clotting point. But the show never slows down enough to lose you, because Mr. Malloy is so infectiously in love with the dark arts of storytelling in all its forms.

In addition to spinning crazy, mixed-up yarns about subjects including premature burial and death by subway car, “Ghost Quartet” slyly addresses the questions of why we want to believe in ghosts and feel the need to keep talking about them.

And I promise you, you will believe by the evening’s end. People may die, but the stories they tell will continue to divide and multiply, and haunt the world for as long as the human race exists. The ways in which the last number attests to this creed is one of the most ingenious and affecting finales I’ve come across in years.

I won’t go into further detail. Ghost stories, more than any kind of fiction, should never be ravaged by spoilers. Let’s just say that Mr. Malloy and company find new ways for guaranteeing that this exultant production’s melody lingers on, in the finest tradition of phantoms that never say die.

We walked to and from the theater.  This is the Easter Empire State Building.  The windows of our apartment look directly out on this every night.  It is one block away!