At the end of a dinner break recently, a group of actors and designers sprawled in a loose circle. Two men huddled together, sharing an online video, another man scrolled through a feed, fingers skimming the screen like skaters gliding across a frozen lake. A woman lay on the floor stretching, her phone nestled neatly at her hip.
They were rehearsing “Octet,” Dave Malloy’s rich and strange new show (the first musical Signature Theater has produced) about a support group for internet addicts — a category that would seem to include just about everyone.
“Octet” is an a cappella musical. Why? Because instruments are another technology, because why would a band crash a 12-step meeting, because Mr. Malloy believes in writing the thing that scares you the most, a dictum he credits to the playwright Young Jean Lee. An a cappella musical about internet addiction fits that bill. He has already read tweets and Tumblr posts knocking the idea as too cutesy.
To make it a little less cutesy, Mr. Malloy studied not only college a cappella (three “Octet” actors and Annie Tippe, the show’s director, are veterans of the New York University a cappella group N’Harmonics), but also Tuvan throat singing, Appalachian shape note singing, German yodeling choirs, Balkan choruses and the work of composer-performers like Meredith Monk and Caroline Shaw.
“There’s just so much more variety in terms of what a human voice can do,” he said, in an office at the Signature Center before the evening’s rehearsal.
Best known for the Tony Award-winning “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812,” Mr. Malloy didn’t want to reprise himself. “Octet,” he said, “is pretty aggressively different: It’s contemporary material. There’s no orchestra. It’s not immersive in that way. It’s pretty dark.”
Still “Great Comet” and “Octet” aren’t entirely unconnected. “Great Comet” closed abruptly in 2017 after producers attempted to replace Okieriete Onaodowan with Mandy Patinkin and some social media users took up their digital pitchforks.
Mr. Malloy had always had his normal share of online addictions, mostly games, but that week he found himself compulsively refreshing his Twitter page, looking at what teenagers and strangers and robots had written, he said.
That experience worked its way into “Refresh,” a song about a woman who has been internet shamed. “It’s been nice to be thinking about some of my own demons and putting them onstage through music,” Mr. Malloy said. Other songs borrow lyrics from gaming forums, social media feeds, sites devoted to QAnon conspiracies.
“Octet,” whose eight characters are based on archetypes drawn from Tarot cards, joins other plays and operas from the past decade — Nico Muhly’s “Two Boys,” Ted Hearne’s “The Source,” James Graham’s “Privacy,” Tim Price’s “Teh Internet Is Serious Business,” Jennifer Haley’s “The Nether,” even “Dear Evan Hansen” — tracing the social changes the internet has wrought and might wreak.
Mr. Malloy’s musical asks us to see ourselves in its addicted characters — not a big stretch — and to pay attention to how the internet affects all of us, in ways both bad and good. (The production itself is low-tech, but not anti-tech; the eight singers wear in-ear monitors.)
The songs, not only in their lyrics, but also in their keys, time signatures and chord progressions, tell complicated stories about life in a wired world.
Before rehearsal Mr. Malloy stayed to discuss three of the show’s songs in depth, breaking down the sound. (Ms. Tippe stayed for a while, too, then ran out to grab some dinner.)
‘Candy’
Mr. Malloy and Ms. Tippe weren’t sure how to describe this deceptively peppy number in which a man, Henry, describes an obsession with Candy Crush-like games. A pop hoedown? A gospel tune? A sea chantey?
The time signature jumps around. “Like a game,” Mr. Malloy said, though unlike a few numbers in “Great Comet,” he hasn’t modeled this song on actual video game music.
The early sections “are supposed to be infectious to make you want to play,” Mr. Malloy said. “There’s just like a cuteness to it that hides the harmful behaviors.” The tempo marker reads “Fun and frisky”; the chords go up as Henry sings about his scores rising.
Then the key switches from B major to E minor and the chorus grows more droning, a gesture toward “the dronelike sensation of playing video games for a while,” Mr. Malloy said. The song darkens, with a few chord changes borrowed from Radiohead’s “OK Computer,” an album about technology and despair.
At the end, the initial melody is repeated, but more slowly as Henry faces his addiction: “I suspect deep down / I don’t care if I die,” he sings.
‘Monster’
This choral number “is about Twitter and Donald Trump mostly,” Mr. Malloy said. “And trolls.”
The men lay down a guttural beat, an illustration of online male toxicity. On top of the beat the women in the cast sing notes that are brighter and beltier, “but there’s a death march quality to this song,” he added. The tempo marker? “Relentless dirge.”
The song explores how the internet — the president’s tweets and rest of it — can forge new destructive neural pathways in the brains of people who can’t stop logging on. “It’s a monster that gets inside your head and won’t leave,” Mr. Malloy said.
The song begins as metaphor — a monster despoils a forest path — but then the beat drops out, the music shifts and the chorus sings it like it is: “Your brain is chemically changed / Your mind goes dark and strange / And you fall apart.”
“It’s a warning,” Ms. Tippe said.
‘Actually’
A song whose lyrics are largely adapted from online video game forums and QAnon conspiracy sites, “Actually” begins as punk number. “I think there’s a weird overlap in terms of conspiracy theorists and the aesthetics of punk rock,” Mr. Malloy said. “They share a very strong anti-institutional, think-for-yourself D.I.Y. mentality.”
Three of the men lay down a beat inspired by experimental rock band TV on the Radio. “Wake up, wake up? Cuz there are no coincidences,” the fourth man, Toby, sings over the top.
The songs shifts from major to a haunting minor as the chorus sings QAnon text. “Some of the language is so beautiful,” Mr. Malloy said. “‘Be a virus of confidence’ is such amazing poetry.”
Then it shifts to another minor key, with the women singing close harmonies that sound synthesized, dehumanized, as Toby argues on various forums. He runs an online search for “internet addiction,” and the other men make a didgeridoo-like sound drawn from Gregorian chant and Tuvan throat singing.
At the end, the song returns to its initial melody, but in a minor key this time, with Toby even more committed to his theories.
“He fully embraces nihilism,” Mr. Malloy said.
