Good things may come in threes, but not all things that come in threes are good. Inner Voices, a triptych of solo musicals, contains one highly accomplished piece: the middle panel, Arlington, in which the prodigiously gifted Alexandra Silber plays a soldier’s wife with a dawning sense of her husband’s darkness. The splendid smoothness and control of Silber’s soprano works beautifully against her chatty, lonely character’s disintegrating sense of world order; under Jack Cummings III’s dexterous direction, she does full justice to the vivid and shifting colors of Victor Lodato’s words and Polly Pen’s music.
Arlington is bookended, however, by two less successful attempts at musical monologue. Martin Moran and Joseph Thalken’s meandering Borrowed Dust stars Hunter Foster as a man grieving over the loss of his younger brother; overdetailed yet depthless, it has the feel of a loud drama-therapy session, and not a breakthrough one. And although Arielle Jacobs brings full-throated intensity to the role of a Muslim girl who has been raised as a boy in Farhad or the Secret of Being, Nilo Cruz’s libretto provides uneven support for Jim Bauer’s evocative, well-arranged music. Inner Voices' clouds are redeemed by their Silber lining, but her solo might be even stronger on its own.—Adam Feldman