I gained a whole new understanding of “The Three Little Pigs” at the end of Dave Malloy’s latest sing-through musical theater piece, which has a lively score and a gifted cast, but largely falls short of its effort — seemingly inspired by Sondheim’s approach in “Into The Woods” — to say something significant about life during the pandemic. Still, the ending is a revelation.

 At an open mic night in a dark bar, three storytellers take turns singing of their experiences during lockdown. Their stories are shot through with monsters and metaphors and coincidences, and with allusions to one popular folktale in particular: The bartender, Wolf, gives a gift to each one before their performance — to Susan a straw for her drink;  to Sadie, a (swizzle) stick; to Beckett (dispensing with the clever bartender tie-in)  a brick.

In the folktale, you may recall, each of the three porcine siblings builds a house to protect themselves from being eaten by the Big Bad Wolf – the first house made of straw, the second of sticks, and the third of brick. The wolf easily blows down the house of straw, sending the first pig scurrying to the house of sticks, which the wolf also easily destroys, with the two pigs then escaping to the house made of bricks. That one is too sturdy for the wolf to blow down, and the wolf then makes the fatal error of trying to enter through the chimney.
The moral of the story, as I’ve always heard it, is that it pays to be diligent and prepared, like the third pig, and unlike the other two. But a character in “Three Houses,’ the grandfather, offers a clue to a different meaning: “ The three little pigs isn’t about architecture, you know” – which soon after leads to a “Coda.” The three main characters, who have each sung separately one after the other for about thirty minutes apiece about their isolation, get together to sing of the dream they had of “three strangers at one table” who tentatively touch one another. “In that moment/you didn’t feel like a stranger/you felt like family.” It helps immensely that the three golden-voiced performers — Margo Seibert as Susan, Mia Pak as Sadie and J.D. Mollison as Beckett – render in glorious harmony this most tuneful song in the show.

It’s community that allows the little pigs to survive the Wolf – and, Malloy seems to be indicating, a sense of community and connection that would have us survive past the pandemic. An uplifting message, mellifluously delivered. But it arrives too late to redeem all that precedes it.

The first ninety minutes certainly have pleasing moments. The music is pleasant enough, the quartet playing it is lovely. The lyrics are occasionally well-wrought and touching. In “haze,” Sadie sings a refrain

my heart broke
and then the world broke
and then my brain broke too.

and I don’t know which one to blame
I just know I’m not the same.
I’ve been drifting,
drifting through the haze.

And there are playful moments. Sadie spends fourteen hours a day online,  building a replica of her grandmother’s house as part of a SIMS-like video game; the other performers portray the video game avatars. (The other two also give in to (less vivid) obsessions, Susan alphabetizing the home library, Beckett relentlessly shopping online.)

But it all begins to feel repetitive. Why are all three stories so similar? Each of the three characters has just split up with their partner/spouse, each retreats to an empty house thanks to a relative – Susan’s in Latvia, Sadie’s in New Mexico, Beckett’s in Ireland — each conjures up their grandfather and grandmother (portrayed each time by Henry Stram and Ching Valdes-Aran) and each lives in isolation with a talking creature (each of them puppets) – Susan with a Latvian dragon, Sadie with a video badger, Beckett with a gigantic spider.

For close to fifteen years, Dave Malloy has impressed me with his febrile talents and fierce intelligence, his ability to turn such arcana as a slice of “War and Peace” into the popular “Natasha, Pierre and The Great Comet of 1812”  and Internet addiction into “Octet,” put together in 2019 by the same creative team and some of the same cast as “Three Houses.” It was also presented by Signature; indeed, “Octet” was the theater’s first-ever musical

Like these other shows ,“Three Houses” is surely meant to charm, but it more often struck me as peculiar or pointless. If it’s saying something more weighty than the finale’s message that we need connection, I missed it.

There will likely be theatergoers who will react the same way Sadie does when, after Susan’s performance, the Wolf asks “whaddya  think? “

“Oh! Yeah, this place is cooooooool.The whole open mic confessional thing. And the ghosts are trippy.”

Three Houses
Signature Theater through June 9
Running time: About 100 minutes with no intermission
Tickets: $49 – $124
Music, lyrics, book and orchestrations by Dave Malloy
Directed and choreographed by Annie Tippe
Music direction and supervision by Or Matias
Scenic design by dots, costume design by Haydee Zelideth, lighting design by Chrisotpher Bowser, sound design by Nick Kourtides, hair and makeup design by Earon Nealey, puppet design by James Ortiz
Cast: J.D. Mollison as Beckett/Zippy, Mia Pak as Sadie/Pookie, Margo Seibert as Susan/Shelob, Scott Stangland as Wolf, Henry Stram as Grandfather, and Ching Valdes-Aran as Grandmother. Mona Seyed-Bolorforosh (Conductor/Piano/Organ), Yuko Naito-Gotay (Violin), Blair Hamrick (French Horn), and Maria Bella Jeffers (Cello).