Octet is a must-see a cappella musical about the twistiest corners of the internet | Canada Voices

Title: Octet

Written by: Dave Malloy

Performed by: Damien Atkins, Alicia Ault, Andrew Broderick, Ben Carlson, Hailey Gillis, Zorana Sadiq, Jacqueline Thair, Giles Tomkins

Directed by: Chris Abraham

Choreographed by: Cameron Carver

Company: Crow’s Theatre, Soulpepper Theatre Company and the Musical Stage Company

Venue: Crow’s Theatre

City: Toronto

Year: Runs to Oct. 19

Critic’s Pick

“You are a piece of God’s plan,” reads a colourful decal on the set of Octet, the breathtaking a cappella musical about the internet and its capacity to harm, now playing at Crow’s Theatre.

The word “plan” hangs askew, as if God’s somehow laughing at us – as if predetermination is nothing more than a sick joke in an era of constant exposure to the worst of humanity.

Written by American composer Dave Malloy, it’s arguable whether Octet is a musical at all. There’s not much by way of a plot – think Songs for a New World or A Chorus Line – and Malloy’s songs bind together as a singular piece of theatre with only a dollop of given circumstances. It’s nothing like Malloy’s dense, extraordinarily story-driven Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812, or even his moody song cycle Ghost Quartet.

In director Chris Abraham’s staging, Octet is a requiem for the human intellect turned to mush by digitized pornography and gore. It’s a release valve for the feelings of anguish and rot that follow perpetual doom-scrolling. Is it a musical in the traditional sense? Perhaps not. But in Abraham’s hands, it’s something richer – and a disturbing night at the theatre you’d miss at your peril.

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Malloy’s premise is reasonably simple: We’re in a church basement (expertly designed by Joshua Quinlan), where a support group has gathered to discuss their addiction to screens. Some of them struggle with gaming; a few can’t seem to get off dating apps. A young woman languishes in dark corners of the web, on sites that normalize self-harm and suicide. An older man waits in chat rooms for irrefutable proof of the existence of God.

It’s a bleak collection of introverts, incels and wayward souls, each of whom hopes to gain something from the group (even if that just means being listened to). They swap coping strategies – Set timers on your most-used apps! Lock your phone in a cookie jar, or better yet, lob it into oblivion! Take a walk! – and sing hymns about blood-bellied monsters and inescapable forests.

The music and performances are superlative – more on those in a moment – but it’s Quinlan’s set and Nathan Bruce’s embedded videos that ought to set a new standard for theatre design in Canada.

That impish “God’s plan” sticker aside, Quinlan’s church basement synthesizes familiar design pieces from previous Crow’s projects – the LED video floor from Wights, the square ceiling panels from The Master Plan – and manages to create a space that feels brand-new, yet surprisingly analogue. You can almost smell the mildew in the cracks of the (digital) parquet floor, in the same way you might feel your thumbs twitch when that same floor mutates into a never-ending game of 2048.

Malloy’s score is everything you’d hope from an a cappella exploration of cyberspace, a wide-reaching mélange of choral composition inspired by the likes of everyone from Randall Thompson to Eric Whitacre. Strange musical intervals and rhythmic percussion crunch together before contracting into prettier, less frightening chirps.

Under the crisp music direction of Ryan deSouza, Octet offers a sumptuous sonic landscape where no two songs sound alike. (And thanks to Olivia Wheeler’s sound design, not a single word gets lost to amplification troubles.)

Case in point: A late-in-the-game musical monologue about science and doubt, called Little God, stretches the art of a cappella into a ludicrously difficult conversation between performer Ben Carlson and the rest of the cast. The timing has to be perfect; the harmonies have to scrape just so. It’s a powerful diatribe, dramaturgically speaking, and a surprisingly poignant musical highlight of the show.

While Abraham’s ensemble cast is uniformly strong, there are a few standouts in addition to Carlson. Hailey Gillis offers a performance that couldn’t be more different from the Russian countess she finished playing only a month ago, while Damien Atkins’s bluegrass-tinged descent into Candy Crush mania shows off both the performer’s vocal stamina as well as Cameron Carver’s clever, frenetic choreography.

All this in mind, Octet may be divisive. Malloy’s material already feels dated since premiering off-Broadway in 2019 – our relationship with the internet underwent changes during the pandemic that fundamentally affected how we relate to one another. Those missing shifts in our culture are palpable here.

As such, Octet’s deep dives into screen addiction aren’t always, well, deep – some of the arguments Malloy makes about Reddit and short-form video feel obvious and a touch redundant. (I felt similarly about Max Wolf Friedlich’s Job when it played at Coal Mine Theatre last spring: Nothing ages quicker than a hot take about a technology that grows more powerful by the nanosecond.)

But what makes Octet a must-see is the extent to which all its elements swirl together to create an experience unrivalled in craft. Mine is just one opinion out of trillions on the internet – indeed, Octet’s first few minutes take aim at those who trumpet their thoughts across the web, the so-called “tastemakers” who treat online discourse like opium.

Even filtered through the chaotic din of cyberspace, I hope you’ll take my recommendation: This production’s cast, design and music demand to be observed in-person, and away from the omnipotent cloud of push notifications, snuff films, AI slop and political noise that have come to define life in the digital age.