Three Houses tickets

Tony Award nominee Dave Malloy is known for his shape-shifting styles: in his most famous work, Broadway’s Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812, he adapted a passage of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, infusing it with modern musical sensibilities to recreate a centuries-old, epic love story. He has also crafted more intimate works, like the song cycle about grief, Ghost Quartet, and, more recently, Octet, about eight contemporary characters who are addicted to the internet. Now, in Three Houses, he creates a similarly small-in-scale and large-in-scope piece about six adrift people (and creatures) longing for home.

Annie Tippe directed Octet and won the Lucille Lortel Award for Best Direction for that musical, and now returns to Signature Theatre with Malloy for Three Houses. A musical theatre director hot on the rise, Tippe has also directed a number of world premiers, showing off her chops as an advocate and shaper of new musicals.

What to watch for

• Three Houses features a cast of six, including two actors (Margo Seibert and J.D. Mollison) who were previously in Octet and Scott Strangland who was in Great Comet. Rounding out the cast are Mia Pak (Suffs), Henry Stram (The Crucible), and Ching Valdes-Aran (A Song of Songs).
• Signature Residencies at the Off-Broadway theatre have offered more than 37 playwrights an artistic home. For each resident playwright, the theatre commits upfront to producing at least three plays to showcase an artist’s body of work. Dave Malloy is one such resident, and Three Houses follows Octet as his second work.
• For audiences looking to arrive to the show early, Signature features one of New York’s largest, coziest theatre lobbies: with couches and seating aplenty, plus a full-service bar and small bookshop, the second-floor lobby is a great working and meeting space for a pre-show beverage.
• Themes of isolation carry through a number of Dave Malloy pieces: in Octet, support group members bond over their addiction to the internet, and in Moby Dick, he modernizes Herman Melville’s tale of a man at sea. Now, in Three Houses, Malloy spotlights three lonely figures refinding themselves in new homes and searching for community.