Dave Malloy
About Dave Malloy
Bio (from his website)
​Dave Malloy is a composer/writer/performer/orchestrator. He has written thirteen musicals, including Octet, a chamber choir musical about internet addiction; Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812, an electropop opera based on a slice of Tolstoy’s War & Peace (12 Tony nominations, including Best Musical, Score, Book, and Orchestrations); Ghost Quartet, a song cycle about love, death, and whiskey; Preludes, a musical fantasia set in the hypnotized mind of Sergei Rachmaninoff; Little Bunny Foo Foo, a forest entertainment for small people; Three Pianos, a drunken romp through Schubert’s “Winterreise”; Black Wizard/Blue Wizard, an escapist RPG fantasy; Beowulf—A Thousand Years of Baggage, an anti-academia rock opera; Beardo, a reinterpretation of the Rasputin myth; Sandwich, a musical about killing animals; and Clown Bible, Genesis to Revelation told through clowns. He has won two Obie Awards, a Smithsonian Ingenuity Award, a Theater World Award, the Richard Rodgers Award, an ASCAP New Horizons Award, and a Jonathan Larson Grant, and has been a MacDowell fellow and Composer-in-Residence at Ars Nova and the Signature Theatre. Future projects include an adaptation of Moby-Dick. He lives in Brooklyn.
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Check out this link to see his blog post about conceptualizing Great Comet: http://davemalloy.blogspot.com
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Peruse his website. You won't regret it. It's quite fun.
http://davemalloy.com/index.html
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Creating Great Comet
Great Comet was written as Malloy's commissioned piece when he was the Composer-In-Residence of Ars Nova. Before having the idea for this show, he had only written three "very weird semi-musicals" : Gogol, Sandwich, and Clown Bible. He had grown up on golden-age movie musicals, as well as the CDs for Jesus Christ Superstar, Les Misérables, and Miss Saigon, which he cites as his influences. However, he hadn't really listened to musicals post-1991, and did not see himself as a theatre composer, identifying more as an avant-garde classical composer or an electric jazz pianist. He eventually got more and more involved in theatre as a pianist, music director, sound designer, and composer. After Rachel Chavkin and Ars Nova saw his show Beowulf in 2009, they liked it so much they offered him a residency, where he wrote Great Comet. Malloy, similarly, knew he wanted to work with Rachel Chavkin on Great Comet after working with her on Three Pianos at New York Theatre Workshop.
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Source: Dave Malloy. "Creating A Comet." Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812: The Journey of a New Musical to Broadway (p. 9-13).
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Beowulf:
http://davemalloy.com/beowulf.html
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Three Pianos:
https://www.nytw.org/show/three-pianos/
http://davemalloy.com/threepianos.html
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