One Pot of Honey, One Piece of Stardust, One Secret Baptism, and a Photo of a Ghost

The Ghost Quartet and enigmatic theater

Consider listening to The Ghost Quartet before, during, or after reading.

When I was a teenager, I wanted a fake ID. Not because I wanted to go out to bars or to buy cigarettes, although surely that would be a perk, but because I wanted to see The Ghost Quartet. Written and composed by Dave Malloy, The Ghost Quartet is a musical song cycle. Straight from the mouth, or rather text, of Dave Malloy, it is “a song cycle about love, death, and whiskey. A camera breaks and four friends drink in an interwoven tale spanning seven centuries, with a murderous sister, a treehouse astronomer, a bear, a subway, and the ghost of Thelonious Monk.”¹ Whiskey is ritually served to audience members throughout the performance, hence why I desired a fake ID. At twenty-three, you couldn’t pay me to drink whiskey, unless it was in sour form, but listening to this for the first time at fifteen, I believed that if I poured myself a short glass of Maker’s Mark everything would suddenly make sense to me. Through discovering the ambrosia of the Gods, something would click. 

I first discovered The Ghost Quartet after listening to Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812, a Broadway musical also written and composed by Dave Malloy. I had the pleasure of seeing it on Broadway days before it closed after a year long love affair with it. My grandparents have always been fans of the theater, the walls of an entire room in their home dedicated to displaying playbills, and one day at the end of August, my grandma took me into the city to see the show. Ecstatic is not even an adequate word to describe how I felt that day. The Great Comet of 1812, another example of enigmatic theater, I would argue, had quite an interesting stage set up. The show itself is meta, an opera inside of a musical, and to depict this, there are seats on stage. I was lucky enough to have a seat on stage, and I will be thinking about it for the rest of my life. Throughout the show the actors milled around me, close enough to reach out and touch. When one of the actors got near me my breath would catch in my throat. It was truly a magical experience. Justice won’t be served until it is put back onto Broadway, but that’s a conversation for a later date. 

From Exeunt Magazine

The Ghost Quartet is spell-binding, mystical, confusing, and glorious. The voices— composed of only four people, Brittain Ashford, Gelsey Bell, Dave Malloy, and Brent Arnold— are haunting and alluring. Brittain Ashford and Gelsey Bell were also in the Broadway production of The Great Comet of 1812. The story, or rather stories, of The Ghost Quartet center around four primary characters and their multiple reincarnations that span centuries. There are four fundamental plotlines. The primary plotline follows the character Rose Red, her love affair with an astronomer, and the aftermath of their tumultuous relationship. The Usher plotline, which follows the Usher family and the fallout following the abduction of the patriarch’s daughter’s baby. The modern plotline follows an accident in the subway, where a victim is pushed onto the tracks. The fourth plotline is known as the Ancient plotline. In the songs that follow this plotline, Rose Red and her sister Pearl are shown as reincarnations of Scheherazade and her sister Dunyazad, from the story Arabian Nights. Each character that appears in this song cycle is the imagined reincarnation of one of the four primary characters: Rose Red, Pearl, the Astronomer, and the Bear.

Photo by Ryan Jensen

The narrative begins with an introduction in which the characters express their own confusion regarding the story they are about to sit down and tell. The story is circular and cyclical, not meant to be truly understood. The story is something one is supposed to innately understand, without being able to explain it with words. In “I Don’t Know”, the opening number, the characters articulate their fear that they don’t understand anything about the universe or their own personal worlds. With that we enter the second song, in which one of the characters enters a camera shop, where her understanding of the world is soon to be entirely shattered. 

Chronologically speaking, “The Camera Shop”, the second song of the musical, appears at the end of the story, but in the scheme of a story like this, that certainly does not matter. Each song is labyrinthine. Rose walks into a camera shop where she meets the owner, who begins to tell her a story about her great-grandmother, who is incidentally also named Rose. She shows Rose a fiddle that belonged to her Rose, a fiddle made from the breastbone of Pearl, her sister. The Rose who walked into the camera shop remarks how white the fiddle is. The camera shop owner goes on to tell the story of her great-grandmother and her sister. As history would have it, Rose and Pearl lived by the sea and spent their nights collecting salt. When Rose meets an Astronomer, she falls in love with him. He pretends to love her back, only to steal her astronomical writing to be published in a prestigious astronomy journal to which he is the editor. She vows to hate him forever, and as she nurtures this hatred and animosity, he turns his sights on Pearl. At learning this, Rose seeks out a bear somewhere deep in the forest and begs a favor of him. She asks him to maul the Astronomer and to turn her dear sister into a crow, trapping them in a cave together. Rose reasons that this will inevitably force her sister to eat the eyes of the Astronomer for survival. In return, the Bear requests a pot of honey, a piece of stardust, a secret baptism, and a photo of a ghost.

Back in the camera shop, Rose says that she doesn’t believe what the owner of the shop is telling her, to which Pearl asks her, “don’t you remember?” introducing the notion that all of the stories that are to be introduced are connected and that there is a general flow of knowledge amongst these stories.

Thus sets into motion the primary premise of The Ghost Quartet: Rose’s undertaking of fulfilling the Bear’s request in order to enact vengeance on the man who broke her heart and the sister who shattered her mind. She must go through several different lifetimes in order to procure each item.

We then transition to the victim of this secret baptism in the song titled “Starchild.” The child who was secretly baptized, in a religion unknown to her, reckons with the ramifications of such a baptism as she navigates the world and her own sense of spirituality. She feels that something has been taken from her, although she is unsure what it is. Perhaps it is a true sense of belonging, since a choice was made for her long before she was able to comprehend it. This, of course, can certainly be said about all baptisms, but the worry is especially poignant in regards to our Starchild. She refers to this baptism as “being blessed by a stranger.”

Changing tracks, the fourth song pertains to the desired photo of a ghost. The song details the manner in which Rose is able to obtain a photo of a ghost, through taking a photo right at the moment of someone’s death. Rose constructs a situation in which a person, who happens to be her sister, Pearl, in one of her many reincarnations, is pushed onto the tracks of the subway right before a train comes.

Following the death of the person shoved onto the tracks, we are thrown into the tumultuous lives of the Usher family. The year is 1873, and the Usher’s daughter, Roxie, has given birth to a child at a very young age. Lady Usher, the mother of Roxie, opens the song by saying, “I suffer from a family evil / I am a slave to terror… / I dread the future / my little girl is dying”. Roxie’s daughter, Starchild, is stolen from her, and as a result she falls deathly ill, unable to hold on without her baby. It is in this song that we learn that Roxie’s baby, who is stolen by Rose to enact vengeance on her ex-lover and her sister, is incidentally the child of the Astronomer, the very man she seeks to ruin.

In “Soldier and Rose”, Rose seeks out a Soldier who is preoccupied by her death and her yearning for it. Rose seduces the Soldier in order to take her honey from her, just another instance of manipulation in order to fulfill the Bear’s request. The Soldier implores Rose to promise her to kill her for her honey, promising not to haunt her when she is dead, singing to Rose, “if you’re gonna steal my honey / please wait until I’m drunk / then take me onto the dance floor / and let me cry against your cheek / then take me out back / and shoot me in the alley / I won’t speak / I won’t say a word / I won’t come back to haunt you / I won’t have the time”, and with that, Rose secures the honey that the Bear has demanded with more blood on her hands.

We are introduced to the Astronomer in the eighth song. In this song, the Astronomer reckons with religion, his own inadequacy, and the existentialism that arises through spending his days staring out at the stars and the universe.

Usher Part II brings us back to the Usher storyline, where Roxie lays dying. She is fevered, and her mind has long departed her. After being told once more that her daughter is gone, Roxie dies.

The Telescope, the object in which each character orbits around in some way, shape, or form, throughout the interweaving narratives. In the twelfth song, the story regarding the fallout between Rose and her Astronomer is told, the inciting incident of the narrative coming to light. His betrayal in this song is not depicted as necessarily malicious, it is more so pathetic and envious. He admires the way that Rose sees the world, in such a way that he could never possibly. Their minds work in drastically different ways, and he wishes that he were more like her. The Astronomer is a man full of self-hatred and self-pity. He is incapable of taking responsibility for his own actions, and constantly views himself as a victim. As he prompts Rose to look through his telescope, he is in awe at the way she interprets the cosmos. Rose interprets a red star as rage, singing, “I see fire in the darkness / rage against the void / I see every time Man cried out / and raised his sword against God”. She interprets a blue star as maternal, singing, “I see mothers weeping in chairs / clutching their shawls in the morning / everything is lost / all is gone”. This is, of course, an ode to Roxie and her stolen baby, though chronologically, this moment with Rose and the Astronomer is what catalyzes the kidnapping of Starchild. The last time she looks through the Astronomer’s telescope, she sees two stars. The Astronomer tells her that they are called Sigma Orionis AB, a binary star that has been lost in time. As she looks at these stars, she wistfully sings, “two women / in the forest / in the evening / in a light rain / the older has no expression on her face / the younger hangs her head down / the younger is in love / was in love / is in love / was in love / but the lover is in love / with the older not the younger”. This, of course, prophesies what is to come for Rose and her sister Pearl, told in a haunting duet between Rose with Pearl in the background.

The narrative shifts in the next song, “Tango Dancer”, to Rose’s retrieval of one piece of stardust per the Bear’s demand. Rose visits Scheherazade, the storyteller from Arabian Nights, traveling back to fourteenth century Persia. As Scheherazade’s story goes, she was married to the monarch, Shahryar, who, after learning his first wife was unfaithful to him, vowed to marry a virgin every day and have her beheaded the next morning in order to avoid the possibility of another betrayal. When there were no more virgins to be found, Scheherazade volunteered herself to be married to the monarch. To avoid death, she begins to spin a long story with no discernable ending. Shahryar is so enchanted by the story that he endeavors to spare her until her story is finished. It is only after 1,001 nights that she concludes the thousandth story she has told the monarch, and discovers she has no other stories left to tell. Over the course of these thousand and one nights, however, Shahryar has fallen in love with Scheherazade, and cannot bring himself to kill her.

Rose asks Scheherazade if she is an Ancient. In return, Scheherazade asks if she knows Rose, saying that she reminds her very much of her own sister. Rose asks her for a piece of stardust which, in this scenario, actually serves as a story, one of many that Scheherazade has told in her life. She waxes poetic and mournfully about her girlhood, of the memories that haunt her yet are lost to her. She sings, “I’m haunted by those memories / so gleeful / so blank / so ready”. She dreams that she meets herself at a tango, and when she asked her younger self for a dance, her younger self declined.

“Lights Out” returns to the Usher timeline. Roxie asks her mother to read her a story, and her mother reads her Arabian Nights, an immediate parallel to Scheherazade telling her sister, Dunyazad, the story of the Usher family in the previous song.

After this interlude with the Usher family, we return briefly to the subway storyline, where we learn why Rose first came into the camera shop. After taking the photograph of the ghost, she is disgusted by what she has done, and throws her camera onto the floor of the subway, shattering it. As the Chorus sings, emulating a traditional ancient Greek Chorus, she had taken a photograph instead of being a hero. “The Photograph” examines the nuances and complexities present in Rose’s relationship with Pearl: her daughter, her sister, her mother, her lover. The intertwining of each storyline in The Ghost Quartet appears in the forefront in this song, illuminated with the breaking of Rose’s camera, a result and also catalyst of these stories. Pearl and Rose were sisters in the two sisters storyline, collecting salt in the moonlight on the shore and falling in love with the same astronomer. They are also sisters in the ancient plotline, as Scheherazade and Dunyazad. In the Usher plotline, antithetically, Pearl can be read as Lady Usher, Rose being her daughter, Roxie. When Rose killed Pearl to get her honey, in the thread in which she was a soldier, Rose seduced her. There is also an instance in a lost storyline where Pearl calls herself Rose’s “little girl”, insinuating that she was Rose’s daughter.

In the song “Bad Men”, many of the storylines blend together. Scheherazade tells her husband the story of Rose and the photograph, blurring the timelines. It is in this song, as well, that Rose first realizes that the Astronomer is with her sister, looking on in horror as the Astronomer asks Pearl to look into his telescope. The song ends with the completion of Rose’s task, collecting the four things the Bear asked for. She brings them to the Bear, only to discover that the Bear never planned on following through on his end of the deal, refusing to be a part of Rose’s revenge.

In the final song of the Usher plotline, the Usher and Subway plotlines merge with one another. Lady Usher, unable to fall asleep in the wake of her daughter’s death, is read a story by her husband, Edgar. As it so happens, the story that he tells her is the story of the subway accident. Lady Usher, a reincarnation of Pearl, then dies twice as the song reaches its conclusion— as Lady Usher and as the victim in the subway accident. Pearl sings, I looked up on the platform / and saw Rose / back from the dead / standing there with her camera / I lifted my head / and smiled / smiled for the camera / you know that moment right before you die / is such a gift / because you get to choose what goes through your head / what your last song will be / I thought of someone I love very much / smiling in bed / clutching a teddy bear / and then / I let the train rip through me”, combining two of Pearl’s lives.

In one of the next songs, “Hero”, Rose reckons with the fact that in order to get revenge on her sister, she effectively as her killed— as Pearl was, in one of these intermingling lifetimes, the victim in the subway. Rose realizes that all of her efforts were worthless and that she has irrevocably sinned. It is in this song that she gives up her desire to transcend normal humanity, the desire that was born back in “Starchild.”

In the final song of the show, “The Wind & Rain”, it is revealed that the tumultuous relationship of Rose and Pearl transcend even the many different plotlines covered over the course of The Ghost Quartet. In this last revealed plotline, they retell the folk song “The Two Sisters”, which is a murder ballad that dates back to the seventeenth-century and parallels the story of Rose and Pearl.

Each plotline in The Ghost Quartet influences and impacts the other plotlines. They are intrinsically linked and messily entangled. Each plotline is ultimately resolved but still, due to the nature of these stories, feel as if things were left unanswered and unsettled.

The spooky, labyrinthine, convoluted, and meandering ambience of The Ghost Quartet and the interweaving plotlines that span generations and centuries create an enigmatic aura that is completely unparalleled to any other musical experience.

Dave Malloy is a mastermind of enigmatic theater, crafting experiences that are unlike any other musical experience. The audience is completely transfixed, pulled into the story as if they are part of it.

1. http://davemalloy.com/ghost.html