It also ended in controversy, when producers attempted to revitalize ticket sales by replacing “Hamilton” veteran Okieriete Onaodowan with Mandy Patinkin in the lead, which had been originally played by Malloy, and on Broadway by Josh Groban. In 2016 Malloy made his Broadway debut with “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812,” an electropop opera based on a section of “War and Peace,” which went on to be nominated for 12 Tony Awards and won two, for lighting and set design. Malloy’s “Ghost Quartet,” which started in Berkeley Rep’s new works incubator the Ground Floor, played San Francisco’s Curran Theater in 2015. He and “Beowulf” collaborator Jason Craig returned to Shotgun in 2011 with “Beardo,” a songplay about Rasputin. “Beowulf - A Thousand Years of Baggage,” his “songplay” with BB&B and Shotgun Players, won the Glickman Award for best play to premiere in the Bay Area in 2008 and went on to a run in New York that helped launch his career there.
Now based in Brooklyn, Malloy started his career in the Bay Area, creating and performing in shows with Banana Bag & Bodice in San Francisco and Berkeley (“Sandwich,” “Gulag Ha Ha,” “The Sewers”) and with Ten Red Hen in the metal shop of Berkeley’s Willard Middle School (“(The 99-cent) Miss Saigon,” “Clown Bible”). So it is still a piece that was written before those times, but there are just some little changes to reflect it.” “I think to actually do a piece about screen time during the time of COVID would be just a completely different piece. “I’ve done some very tiny revisions here and there, just a couple of musical things that were bugging me, and there’s some small adjustments that have made it post-COVID, some lines that just felt so out of place after having just experienced the last two years,” Malloy says. Directed by Annie Tippe, Berkeley Rep’s production features seven out of eight of the original cast. “Octet” premiered in 2019 at New York’s Signature Theatre Company, where Malloy is playwright in residence. So it was like, maybe I should be looking at this.” “I usually make theater about something that I’m obsessed with already,” he adds, “and I saw my own internet tendencies were getting into obsessive and addictive places.