Preludes

"Writer’s block turns out to be a lot more inspiring than you could ever have imagined — and sad and stirring and gloriously fun. In 'Preludes' Dave Malloy makes beautiful music out of a composer’s three years of creative silence...Mr. Malloy and Ms. Chavkin have delivered the best musical about art’s agonies since 'Sunday in the Park With George...' This smashing production says that the American musical is not only not dead but also growing luxuriantly in places you never expected." Full Review

"Malloy’s playfulness is paired with a deep knowledge and love for his subject. The songs display Malloy’s conversational flair and his gift for aching melody. The show could have used more of that unfiltered emotion — it loses focus jumping back and forth, and sometimes gets just a little too clever. The one constant is Malloy’s talent, which, amazingly, isn’t crushed by Rachmaninoff’s long shadow." Full Review

"For all the fancy stagecraft, nothing in this ingeniously staged but overlong and self-indulgent piece comes close to giving the same transporting pleasure as Matias’s ravishing piano playing...In the end, it proves more exhausting than entertaining (or even uplifting) to follow Rach’s loopy thoughts and Malloy’s mannered musicianship. And when the lights come up on all this noisy spectacle, what lingers in the mind is the composer’s deeply felt but simply stated wish: 'I would like to be re... Full Review

"Preludes feels boneless and blobby: a two-hour mishmash of navel-gazing vignettes about the difficulty of being an artist, scored with snatches of classical music and meandering arioso... Flashes of intelligence notwithstanding, Preludes is largely hermetic and dull. " Full Review

"The show is alternately enlightening and tiresome. Malloy and Chavkin find an intriguingly theatrical way to translate the experience of writer's block to the stage in all its arduous and disorienting glory...as 'Rach' meanders through his raw past and stifled present, we the audience sink into his life's lulling monotony and our interest unfortunately begins to waver." Full Review

"Compelling? Yes. Entirely successful as a play, or as a musical whatnot? Not quite. But 'Preludes' is an exciting experiment...'Preludes' earns a high recommendation. Surely, you're unlikely to see anything quite like it." Full Review

"For all the intense effort and vivid conception that have clearly gone into this show, the overriding impression you receive is not of a brilliant mind stifled, but one that was given far too much free rein...If Malloy's songs tend to sound overly meandering or casual, they're hardly terrible. The same cannot easily be said of the other techniques Malloy and Chavkin employ, which veer more toward the haphazard and soulless...The roar of anticlimax is deafening. 'Preludes' might run 80 or 90 ... Full Review

"A load of talent and resources has been thrown at this ambitious bio-drama, which features some rhapsodic music and glorious singing. However, the distancing show is too clever by half; it's dense, exhausting and pretentious...The creative team twists itself inside out trying to make artist's block theatrical and involving. But it can’t be done; at least not here...Nonetheless, the production looks and sounds terrific." Full Review

"If only the show had heart to go with the brains. You can’t help but wish for more emotional payoff...Feels more like a well-performed but dry-eyed thesis.. The music comes and goes — Malloy’s compositions the paler of the two. If you’re looking for a sense of connection, 'Preludes' leaves you between a Rach and a hard place." Full Review

"Anachronisms and malaprops abound, some of the humor is sophomoric and at a couple of points the whole thing comes perilously close to tweenosity. But in the end 'Preludes' is an involving and ultimately moving story about the unknowable ebbs and flows of creativity that artists fear, sometimes master, sometimes fall victim to and invariably navigate over the course of a lifetime. As recreated here, it’s a most intriguing and engaging journey down the rabbit hole of artistic accomplishment." Full Review

"The score for 'Preludes,' which is the best part of the evening, consists of straight Rachmaninoff...There's no consistent sense that what we see emanates from Rachmaninoff's altered brain. Other than a busy, askew scenic design and some lighting effects, things are pretty prosaic...Another issue is that the stakes just don't seem very high. Rachmaninoff is frustrated but hardly devastated by his block." Full Review

"'Preludes' will please some and puzzle others...The problem is that its surreal premise grows thin and it all goes on too long. When Dahl and Rach aren't in the spotlight, it's sometimes difficult to pin down the supporting characters. Tchaikovsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov fade in and out of scenes rather quickly. And with the same actor playing them, it can get mighty confusing...'Preludes' hits some flat notes, but Malloy has reclaimed the salad days of this great composer without sentimentali... Full Review

"I hated this show at first, but it slowly won me over, not to love, but to a respect for what it was doing...The unconventional style of some of Malloy's music doesn't move me, but it's partly my problem. Yet the second half of 'Preludes' has some truly beautiful ballads...'Preludes' won me over. I'm tempted to go again. It's unconventional, but fascinating." Full Review

"What makes 'Preludes' such a marvelous show is the ingenious theatricality with which Malloy and his gifted collaborator, director Rachel Chavkin, chose to dramatize the inner workings of Rachmaninoff’s mind...But that’s only one of the arresting techniques...The coup de théâtre comes with the fateful performance of the Symphony No. 1 in D Minor." Full Review

"Something of a gorgeous mess, 'Preludes' is the latest music-theater work created by Dave Malloy...The trouble is that the story and the production rick-rack between their past, present, factual, fictional, comical and serious points so much that the proceedings are frequently confusing and wildly uneven in tone. Worse, some of Malloy’s contemporary compositions become terribly overblown...Overlong and certainly more overelaborate than it need be, 'Preludes' is an extremely ambitious work th... Full Review

"Malloy’s inspiration also proves to be an impediment. Rachmaninoff’s music dominates the proceedings...More often than not, they’re keeping us from hearing Rachmaninoff’s music. As Chekhov tells Rach, 'use more silence.' If you were wondering what the heck Chekhov is doing here, you wouldn’t be the only one...Malloy does call 'Preludes' a 'musical fantasia,' but there’s a fine line between the creative and the chaotic." Full Review