In which I talk about a (delightfully) complicated musical.

 

 

Ghost Quartet is a musical with many fascinating qualities. It was created by Dave Malloy, and stars Malloy himself, Brittain Ashford, Gelsey Bell, and Brent Arnold (if you’re familiar with Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812, you’ll recognize Brittain Ashford and Gelsey Bell). You can watch a recording of Ghost Quartet here on Dave Malloy’s YouTube channel.

The thing about Ghost Quartet is that there is much to dig into. The characters are interesting, the plot even more so, and the show is so tightly wrapped up in layers that it’s pretty much impossible to understand everything on the first listen.

And today, I’m going to talk about it.

 

 

I don’t even know how to begin (“I Don’t Know”) // the plot

The plot of Ghost Quartet can be put into simple terms, but doing so doesn’t make it any less complicated. Even the very first sung line of the musical, “now I don’t know” (“I Don’t Know”), sets the tone that the following narrative is not going to be very straightforward.

Ghost Quartet, on the surface level, smashes together four seemingly unrelated stories to make something new: Snow White and Rose Red, One Thousand and One Nights / the Arabian Nights, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”, and a photo of someone pushed onto a subway track (you can see the photo here). These are all separate storylines that take place in the musical, linked together only by the characters and their objectives.

Most of these stories are hinted at in the lyrics of the first song, “I Don’t Know”:

• “I’ve got a thousand one stories” references Scheherazade and the Arabian Nights
• “Let me read you a story / let me read you a romance / I will read, you will listen / and this terrible night will pass” is a reference to a passage from “The Fall of the House of Usher”
• “Now I ride the subway every night / staring at the game on my phone” alludes to the subway photo

“I Don’t Know” also introduces the concept of Rose, one of the central characters, living through multiple lifetimes. This is done through Brittain Ashford wondering whether she is “someone that I used to be / or someone that I will be / or someone that I am right now”. With all of these aspects, the first song gives the audience the sense that while the musical won’t follow a conventional narrative, it’ll still be entertaining all the same.

 

I don’t even know who I am (“I Don’t Know”) // the characters

The musical surrounds four central characters: Rose, Pearl, the Astronomer, and the Bear. And these are fairly loose names — they are more like roles in a way. They all relate to each other in some vague way, although how they relate varies depending on which storyline they are in.

Essentially, the conflict presented at first is this: in a vaguely fairy tale era, Rose and Pearl are sisters. Rose falls in love with the Astronomer, but grows to hate him when she discovers he has been stealing her work and publishing it in his name. Things only worsen when the Astronomer falls in love with Pearl.

Angry and vengeful, Rose approaches the Bear and asks him to “maul the astronomer” and “turn [her] sister into a crow” (“Bad Men”) and “put the crow and the corpse in a cave / until the crow started to starve / and she’d have no choice / but to peck out the eyes of her lover and eat them” (“The Camera Shop”). (Nice sibling rivalry you got there, huh.) In exchange for this, the Bear asks for four items: “one pot of honey / one piece of stardust / one secret baptism / and a photo of a ghost” (“The Camera Shop”).

This is where things get complicated, because in order to get these things, Rose has to travel through several lifetimes. And this is how we get multiple iterations of the four central characters in the four storylines.

I think part of the fun of Ghost Quartet is keeping track of who Rose is in any given storyline. Because the actors always stay in their respective roles (e.g. Brittain Ashford will always be Rose and Gelsey Bell will always be Pearl), the question the audience gets to ask is not always “who is Rose?” — which, admittedly, is also a valid question in the musical — but rather, “which Rose is this?”. The same goes for the other three characters.

For example, here are some of the iterations of the central characters presented in Ghost Quartet:

• Rose
  • Rose Red (fairy tale storyline)
  • Roxie + Rose (Usher storyline)
  • Starchild (Usher storyline)
  • Dunyazad (Arabian Nights storyline)
  • The Photographer (subway storyline)
• Pearl
  • Pearl White (fairy tale storyline)
  • The Soldier (perhaps fairy tale storyline, it’s not very clear)
  • Scheherazade (Arabian Nights storyline)
  • Lady Usher (Usher storyline)
  • Camera shop owner (subway storyline)
  • The Victim (subway storyline)
• The Astronomer
  • The Astronomer who stole Rose’s work (fairy tale storyline)
  • Edgar Usher / the Father (Usher storyline)
  • The Astronomer who got Roxie pregnant (also Usher storyline)
  • The Driver (subway storyline)
• The Bear
  • The Bear (fairy tale storyline)
  • The Son (Usher storyline)
  • The Shah (Arabian Nights storyline)
  • The Pusher (subway storyline)

To add to the general fun, it’s also implied that not all the iterations of the four characters are shown in Ghost Quartet. With the nature of the story and the concept of travelling across storylines, there are probably an infinite amount of Roses and Pearls out there — at least, in the universe that Dave Malloy has created.

 

This is a circular story (“The Camera Shop”) // overlapping storylines

Do I fully understand Ghost Quartet? To be honest, probably not. Dave Malloy “deliberately [tried] to promote non-narrative thinking” (source), and I think that there are parts of it that are open to interpretation. As Gelsey Bell sings in “The Camera Shop” , “this is a circular story”, which you can see mapped visually through Dave Malloy’s planning (source).

The circular nature of the story presents the element of repetition. As Rose goes through the storylines, there are patterns that become increasingly evident. Some examples include Rose tending to be at odds with Pearl, Pearl being killed by the Bear (if not Rose), and Rose falling in love with the Astronomer.

As we follow Rose on her quest to gather the four things, the storylines presented in the musical overlap and collide. At first, we are eased into something a little familiar, the subway storyline, with modern Rose (The Photographer) meeting the owner of a camera shop, someone who may or may not be an iteration of Pearl. Through their conversation, the camera shop owner transitions into the Snow White and Rose Red / fairy tale storyline, where the characters appear as Pearl White and Rose Red. From here, we slip and slide through the four storylines, going back and forth and occasionally stopping for audience interaction.

Because of this overlapping of storylines, the four central characters can exist simultaneously. Even if they play different roles, they are always present in some form. Rose is the most obvious example of this, since part of the musical’s plot concerns Rose stealing herself from herself. (To get into the specifics, some version of Rose, likely Rose Red from the fairytale storyline, has crossed lifetimes to steal Starchild from Roxie, both of whom are from the Usher storyline, in order to fulfill “one secret baptism”).

Not only can the characters exist at the same time as themselves, they can also cross storylines. This doesn’t just apply to Rose, as it can also be seen with the Bear in the Usher storyline, called the Son. The Son leaves the Usher Storyline and crosses into the Subway storyline, becoming the Pusher who pushes Pearl “onto the subway track” (“Usher, Part 3”). Also, in the Usher storyline, the Astronomer is both Edgar Usher and Starchild’s father, while remaining two separate people.

Additionally, the characters occasionally seem to display some knowledge of the other timelines. Despite living somewhere in the past, Scheherazade sings about a phone to Rose. She also asks Rose, “Do you remember a time when we weren’t just sisters? Do you remember anything else?” (“Monk”). And this introduces another plotline in the story: Pearl trying to get Rose to remember who she is, or who she was, in all her many lifetimes. Rose seems to show some unconscious awareness of this as the musical goes on, particularly in “Usher, Part 3”, when it is stated that Roxie leaps upon Lady Usher, “her mother / and her sister / and her daughter / and her lover / with the rage of four generations”.

This is further emphasized with the repetitive nature of the story, where there is a continuous cycle depicting two sisters who never seem to resolve their conflict. Unless…?

 

I will try to forgive myself (“Prayer”) // the (somewhat) linear narrative of Ghost Quartet

While Ghost Quartet definitely does not have a conventional narrative, one can still pinpoint a (vague) beginning, middle, and an end.

The beginning, and the inciting incident, lies with the fairytale storyline: Rose and Pearl’s falling out and Rose going to the Bear for revenge. The middle then follows Rose’s quest for the four items. Then we get to the climax, which I believe begins with “Bad Men”, where the Bear tells Rose he never agreed to actually get revenge for her, and then “Usher, Part 3” — where storylines converge and Rose lets Pearl die once again. The denouement follows directly after “Usher, Part 3”, where Rose and the Astronomer/Driver make up, and Pearl and the Bear/Pusher have some closure via Gelsey’s compliment to Brent in “Midnight”, where she tells him, “you’re a really good cello player”. We also find out that Rose and the Driver have two daughters in this storyline. Then, the musical ends with the cycle beginning again.

One could argue that perhaps there is hope that Rose and Pearl do set their rivalry aside in their following lifetimes, seeing as Rose is beginning to remember who Pearl is to her:

 

PEARL/GELSEY: Are you remembering now? Coming back to you?

ROSE/BRITTAIN: I think so. Who all am I?

PEARL/GELSEY: Oh Rose. You’re my sister, and you’re my lover, and you’re my child, and you’re my best friend.

(lyrics from “Midnight”, line breaks omitted)

 

To add to this, not only is Rose beginning to remember who she is, she is learning to let go of the need to be special, or “a hero” (“Hero”). She admits that she made a mistake by allowing her rage to simmer on for so long and not acting when she could have saved Pearl. Rose learns to let go. In her words, “I guess it’s time / to let the dead be dead” (“Hero”).

On the other hand, I have to note that there is evidence otherwise — that Rose and Pearl continue their intergenerational fight. The final song, “The Wind and the Rain”, retells the tale of one sister who kills another, demonstrating the cycle starting again.

I think it’s up to you to decide what happens to Rose and Pearl in the future.

 

And if you could be a part of breakfast, what part of breakfast would you be? (“Any Kind of Dead Person”) // audience involvement

The final thing I want to talk about is how Ghost Quartet doesn’t take itself too seriously. A lot of the enjoyment is derived from the overall experience (in Side 3, the lights are turned off for around three songs so you’re left there in the dark, listening to Gelsey Bell screech into a microphone in the most unnerving way possible. It’s great.)

There are several numbers in the show that don’t necessarily add the plot, but add a layer of fun to the whole performance and engage the audience. Some examples of these are “Any Kind of Dead Person”, which is just plain fun, and “Four Friends”, where shots of whiskey get passed around. Dave Malloy also states that in the final song, they pass the instruments out to the audience and leave the room, allowing the audience to finish the show themselves (source).

 

Conclusion

Overall, I may not completely understand Ghost Quartet — and maybe it’s not meant to be fully understood — but I think it’s pretty neat. You can interpret it in many different ways, and not necessarily in the way I see it. That’s all right!

I just think it’s so cool that such a compelling musical can be created by four people and a couple of instruments (as well as the people who do sound, lights, staging, etc.). It’s short, simple in presentation, and yet so very complex. It’s fantastic.

 

 

That’s all for now!

There are probably more things that I could say about this musical, but I think I might stop now, haha.

Have you listened to Ghost Quartet? What are your thoughts on it?

All the best,