Ghost Quartet
| Ghost Quartet | |
|---|---|
CD cover
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| Music | Dave Malloy |
| Lyrics | Dave Malloy |
| Book | Dave Malloy |
| Productions |
Oct 2014 The Bushwick Starr |
| Awards | 2016 Elliot Norton Award, Outstanding Visiting Production |
Oct 2014 The Bushwick Starr
Jan 2015 The McKittrick Hotel
Sep 2015 American Repertory Theater
Oct 2015 Curran Theatre
Ghost Quartet is a musical adaptation of a songcycle, "Ghost Quartet," by a band, also called Ghost Quartet, written and composed by Dave Malloy. The show is described as "a song cycle about love, death, and whiskey. A camera breaks and four friends drink in four interwoven narratives spanning seven centuries"
The show tells four interwoven stories: "a warped fairy tale about two sisters, a treehouse astronomer and a lazy evil bear; a retelling of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher"; a purgatorial intermezzo about Scheherazade and the ghost of Thelonious Monk; and a contemporary fable about a subway murder." The story does not take place in chronological order.
The musical begins by introducing the story and four main characters ("I Don't Know"). Rose, a young woman, visits a camera shop to purchase a new camera, having broken and lost her old one. ("The Camera Shop") There, the owner of the shop tells her a story about her own great-grandmother, whose name was also Rose. She shows Rose a fiddle made from the breastbone of her great-aunt, Pearl. She then tells Rose the story of the two sisters, Rose and Pearl, and an astronomer who lived in a treehouse. The story tells of Rose, who fell in love with the astronomer. She looked through his telescope and wrote in a poem everything she saw. The astronomer, however, stole her writings and published them in his own name, and Rose came to hate him. Soon after, Pearl and the astronomer fell in love, and Rose, furious, asked a bear to kill the astronomer and turn her sister into a crow. In return, the bear asked for one pot of honey, one piece of stardust, one secret baptism, and a photo of a ghost. According to the camera shop owner, Rose stole the honey from a soldier, the stardust from an ancient, and took a child from its teenage mother and baptised her in the sea.
The scene changes and we hear the baptised child, known simply as the "starchild", reflect on being blessed by a stranger and the impact it had on her life ("Starchild"). The scene changes once more to a subway station ("Subway"), with four characters - the driver, the victim, the pusher and the photographer. The victim is pushed in front of the train.
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