Music Dave Malloy Book Dave Malloy Playwright Dave Malloy | Lyrics Dave Malloy Composer Dave Malloy Lyricist Dave Malloy | |
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Productions June 2015
Lincoln Center Theater 3 Similar Ghost Quartet, Three Pianos, Natasha - Pierre & the Great, Passing Strange | ||
Preludes montage
Preludes is a musical fantasia set in the mind of Sergei Rachmaninoff, written and composed by Dave Malloy. The music is a combination of compositions by Rachmaninoff, Malloy, hybrids of the two, as well as music and lyrics from other related compositions.
Contents
Dave malloy and rachel chavkin on preludes
Synopsis
After the disastrous premiere of his first symphony, the young Rachmaninoff suffers from writer’s block. He begins daily sessions with a therapeutic hypnotist, in an effort to overcome depression and return to composing.
Productions
The piece premiered in June 2015 at Lincoln Center Theater 3.
In January 2017, the show made its European and German-language premiere at the Landestheater Linz, Austria.
Critical response
The piece was well received by the New York press; Ben Brantley in the New York Times wrote “Writer’s block turns out to be a lot more inspiring than you could ever have imagine—and sad and stirring and gloriously fun. In Preludes, Dave Malloy makes beautiful music out of a composer’s three years of creative silence…the best musical about art’s agonies since Georges Seurat wielded a twitchy paintbrush in Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Sunday in the Park With George. Mr. Malloy...incorporates wildly diverse sources—classical, folk, electro-pop—into a form that exists defiantly beyond the quotation marks of postmodernism. He’s that rarity, a smart sentimentalist whose self-consciousness about his feelings in no way dilutes them...Along with Fun Home and the soaring, Broadway-bound Hamilton, this smashing production says that the American musical is not only not dead but also growing luxuriantly in places you never expected."”
Recordings
A cast album of the original Lincoln Center production was released on January 19, 2016 by Ghostlight Records.