Dave Malloy

Dave Malloy is an American composer, lyricist, playwright, orchestrator, singer, and actor who grew up in Lakewood, Ohio and studied music composition and English literature at Ohio University. He began making theater in San Francisco in 2000 and has since built a body of work frequently rooted in classic literature and other source material.

Malloy's early collaborations centered on Banana Bag & Bodice, a company for which he has served as composer since 2002. Among those projects was Beowulf – A Thousand Years of Baggage, a 2008 SongPlay with lyrics and book by Jason Craig, commissioned by the Shotgun Players in Berkeley, California. The production earned the 2008 Glickman Award and a 2011 Edinburgh Herald Angel and was performed at venues including Berkeley Repertory's Roda Theatre, ART's Club Oberon, Joe's Pub, and festivals in England, Ireland, Scotland, and Australia. In 2011, Malloy and Craig collaborated again on Beardo, a Russian indie rock musical about Rasputin, which premiered in San Francisco before receiving its New York debut in February 2017 through Pipeline Theater Company.

In 2010, Malloy co-created and performed in Three Pianos, developed alongside Rick Burkhardt and Alec Duffy and directed by Rachel Chavkin, which described itself as a drunken romp through Schubert's Winterreise. The piece premiered at the Ontological-Hysteric Theater, earned a Special Citation Obie Award, and subsequently ran at New York Theatre Workshop and American Repertory Theater.

Malloy's most prominent work is Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812, an electropop opera drawn from a section of Tolstoy's War and Peace, for which he served as composer, lyricist, bookwriter, orchestrator, music director, and performer in the role of Pierre Bezukhov. Commissioned by Ars Nova, the show premiered there in October 2012 under Chavkin's direction. It transferred off-Broadway in May 2013 to Kazino, a custom-built tent erected first in the Meatpacking District and then in Times Square. During its off-Broadway life the production accumulated an Obie Award, the 2013 Richard Rodgers Award for Musical Theater, the Off Broadway Alliance's Best New Musical Award, three Elliot Norton Awards, eight IRNE Awards, three Lucille Lortel Awards among eleven nominations, and nominations from the Drama Desk and Drama League. A pre-Broadway engagement at American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts followed in December 2015. The show opened on Broadway at the Imperial Theatre in October 2016, where it received twelve Tony Award nominations including Best Musical, Best Book of a Musical, and Best Orchestrations — the latter two categories earning Malloy individual nominations in 2017. Josh Groban originated the role of Pierre in the Broadway production, though Malloy reprised the role multiple times during the run and served as the final Broadway Pierre. In 2022, Ohio University, Malloy's alma mater, staged the first American production of the show since its Broadway closing.

Ghost Quartet, a staged concept album Malloy describes as being about love, death, and whiskey, opened in October 2014 at the Bushwick Starr. Following a sold-out run it transferred to the McKittrick Hotel and subsequently played in Edinburgh, San Francisco, and Cambridge, where it received an Elliot Norton Award. Preludes, a musical fantasia set within the mind of composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, premiered at Lincoln Center Theater in June 2015.

Octet, a chamber choir musical examining addiction and nihilism in the context of twenty-first-century technology, featured an eight-part a cappella ensemble and ran at Signature Theatre Company's Residency 5 Theatre in New York City from April 30 to June 30, 2019, directed by Annie Tippe. The production marked the first installment of Malloy's Signature Residency, a five-year arrangement encompassing three shows. Moby-Dick, with book, music, lyrics, and orchestrations by Malloy and direction by Chavkin, ran at American Repertory Theater from December 2019 through January 2020, based on Herman Melville's novel.

In 2021, Malloy appeared in a cameo role in Lin-Manuel Miranda's film adaptation of Jonathan Larson's Tick, Tick... Boom! In November 2023, The Witches, with music and orchestrations by Malloy and book and co-lyrics by Lucy Kirkwood, opened at London's Royal National Theatre. Three Houses, a chamber musical about the Covid-19 pandemic, opened at the Signature Theatre in New York City in May 2024. A future production, Black Swan — based on the 2010 film, with music and lyrics by Malloy and a book by Jen Silverman, directed by Sonya Tayeh — is scheduled to debut at American Repertory Theater in May 2026. Malloy lives in New York.