Review: Magnificent Bird/Book of Travelers, Songwriter Gabriel Kahane's Response to a Divided World

The last 10 years have thrown everyone for a loop. Between the political discord brought on by the election of Donald Trump, the isolation and mass death during Covid, and the omnipresence of social media, our brains, to put it mildly, seem to be collectively fried.

Singer-songwriter Gabriel Kahane certainly felt that way. As he watched Trump’s unexpected ascendence to an international platform, Kahane found himself struggling to understand how something like that could happen. So, he boarded the Lake Shore Limited out of New York the day after the election, with the intention of finding out what was on everyone’s mind. That became a song cycle called Book of Travelers, released as an album in 2018.

Shortly thereafter, Kahane added a new layer to his thought experiment. In discovering how addicted he was to Twitter, he cut himself off from the Internet for a year beginning in November 2019. This self-imposed quarantine was intensified by the country-imposed quarantine brought about by Covid, as well as the permanent move his family made to Oregon because of it. The resulting album, Magnificent Bird, was issued in 2022.

Kahane has toured both records as standalone concerts, and now they are being given theatrical treatment by Playwrights Horizons at its intimate Peter Jay Sharp Theater. They’re performed on alternate nights in what he describes as a replica of his Oregon music studio, with books everywhere, notecards hanging on the walls, a trio of pianos scattered across the room, and the visibility of daylight turning into dusk turning into night seeping in through the window shades. For a solo show that doesn’t really require any set at all, scenographer Oscar Escobedo of the design collective AMP is meticulous in creating tiny details, all of which are strikingly augmented by Christopher Bowser’s theatrically redolent lighting.

Both shows are short — Magnificent Bird, the longer of the two, is about 75 minutes; Book of Travelers is just over an hour — but the lengths don’t dilute the impact. Kahane is an unapologetic intellectual, quoting everyone from Thomas Merton to Aesop, but he does it with an easygoing candor that never intimidates or feels heady. That’s no doubt the effect of director Annie Tippe, who has shaped his performance without standing in his way.

Then there’s the songs, all intimate, relatable, miniature heartbreakers. There’s a bitter irony to open an evening with lyric “What if that was the last show that I’ll ever play?” But when he reprises this song, “Red Letter Days,” at the end of Magnificent Bird, you come to realize that it’s in reference to the same thought we all had during Covid: What if we could never get back to how it was before? (At one point, we’re also treated to a snippet of the piece of music that put him on the map, 2006’s “CraigslistLieder,” a nice little treat for fans of his.)

In listening to Kahane perform, it took me back more than a decade to when I saw his musical February House at the Public Theater. It made me remember how exciting it was to hear his writerly voice for the very first time, a spiritual successor to people like Sondheim and LaChiusa, with a style all his own. That style is on excellent display at Playwrights Horizons through October 13.