Days and months, but also mere minutes, acquire outsize, perhaps even life-altering significance, in three song cycles currently playing intimate venues in Manhattan.
Todd Almond’s “I’m Almost There,” at the Minetta Lane Theater through Oct. 5, takes place over just a few minutes, while Gabriel Kahane’s “Book of Travelers” and “Magnificent Bird,” upstairs at Playwrights Horizons through Oct. 13, cover periods that feel like distinct parentheses in his life.
Under its goofy exterior, Almond’s “I’m Almost There” is a sneakily, formally daring experiment in pared-down musical theater that connects with both mind and heart. This 75-minute Audible production, directed by David Cromer, unfurls over the time it takes for Todd (Almond) to walk down the stairs from his apartment to the street, where Guy, who has just rung his buzzer, awaits. The two met at a brunch the day before and ended up walking around together, until an abrupt parting. Now this possible love interest has unexpectedly turned up, bearing coffee.
An accomplished composer and music director (he collaborated with Laura Benanti on her recent Audible show, “Nobody Cares”), Almond has created something that feels like an interior monologue with the jumbled, digressive quality of a fever dream: Time and space unfold following their own surreal logic and Todd experiences jump cuts from one location to another as the mayhem escalates. “This is exactly what happens when you let someone talk you into brunch,” he says while trying to escape a vampire’s fangs.
An undercurrent of anxiety runs through the show — Todd has a fear of falling from something (like his building’s rooftop when sleepwalking) or for someone (like a certain nice man with whom he just clicks) — but it fuels a self-deprecating, antic energy that keeps the story from lapsing into neurotic solipsism.
Flanked by Erin Hill on harp and vocals and Luke McCrosson on bass, Almond, whose acting credits include “Girl From the North Country,” brings to life a gallery of eccentric characters, but does quite well on his own, enlivening his serviceable vocals with a vividly comic presence. Letting people in is tough, but Todd eventually answers that bell and opens up.
Kahane’s shows, on the other hand, feel closed off despite the musician’s nominal engagement with the world around him. Directed by Annie Tippe and performed in repertory, the works (both under 90 minutes) use the same set — a copy of his studio in Portland, Ore., assembled by the design collective AMP featuring Oscar Escobedo — though it is subtly altered between the performances. The musician, alone onstage, mostly sings from behind a piano, occasionally standing to deliver some of the narrative tissue connecting the songs in a form of direct address to the audience. The overall effect is of Kahane sharing two chapters of a memoir, though too often the manner in which he carefully avoids asperities and any hint of messiness results in an amiable, bland — if casually literary — mush.
“Book of Travelers,” featuring the more ambitious songs, is the better of the two. (He performed a version at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2017.) It’s about the 13 days he spent crossing the country by train after Donald Trump’s election in 2016. He was traumatized, Kahane explains, and wanted to escape his “bougie New York bubble.” Amtrak delivers the expected gallery of colorful characters, but here they are rendered as ethnological samples. Kahane seems to have been genuinely stirred by his experience singing hymns with a group of Old Order German Baptist Brethren, for example, yet we learn little about them as individuals: They are props. The song “October 1, 1939/Port of Hamburg,” about his grandmother’s journey from Germany to California, is more effective at connecting stylistically and emotionally with its subject.
“Magnificent Bird,” about a yearlong digital detox, does not have this kind of emotional anchor. It begins with overly obvious ribbing about the Broadway musical “Aladdin,” then segues into reminiscences about being a struggling artist in New York City. Kahane’s idea of adversity involves giving piano lessons to a boy with sketchy hygiene. As unpleasant as that must have been, it once again feels like an easy laugh tinted with condescension.
The numbers are written in a style that mixes what Kahane describes, in “Magnificent Bird,” as “bespoke quasi-atonal art songs” with indie rock in the Sufjan Stevens mold and the chamber sensibility of the American composers who emerged in the 1990s, like Ricky Ian Gordon, Adam Guettel and Michael John LaChiusa.
Mood and tempo never vary, creating a sense of elegant, well-crafted déjà entendu that is compounded by Kahane’s unwaveringly gentle singing style. (When he joked about modulating his tone “toward the soporific” while reading a bedtime story to his young daughter, I wondered how that would differ from his regular one.) As those who saw the musical “February House” at the Public Theater in 2012 or heard Kahane’s “Magnificent Bird” album (2022) can attest, his compositions benefit greatly from fuller orchestrations and different interpreters. In a solo context, they become soothingly indistinguishable. One wonders what would happen if someone pressed his studio’s buzzer.
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