Ghost Quartet OFF-BROADWAY REVIEWS

• NEW YORK TIMES REVIEW OF Ghost Quartet

  

  The Finest of Dead People
  Dave Malloy's ‘Ghost Quartet’ at the Bushwick Starr

  Ben Brantley

  October 10, 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.

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• TIME OUT NEW YORK REVIEW OF Ghost Quartet

  

  The brilliantly inventive Dave Malloy shares a new song cycle about "love, death and whiskey"

  David Cote

  October 10, 2014: Dave Malloy’s theater songs make you blue like the sky: sad but high. Listening to his brand of emo-pop regret laced with cosmic hope, it’s like you’re watching a spectacular sunrise after a night of whiskey and lame flirting. Which is what might actually happen to you with his semistaged concept album, Ghost Quartet. First, they pass out free Jack Daniel’s. Second, they invite you to join them at a Bushwick bar after four “sides” and 23 songs that weave a drunken path through a forest of fragments (Scheherazade, Poe and the 2012 New York Post photo of a man about to be killed by a subway train). There’s not a linear story to follow, but the material coheres on a rich, intuitive level.

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