There’s a pulsing energy to the new musical The Heart, which uses an electronica-influenced score by husband-and-wife team Anne and Ian Eisendrath as a backbeat for the story of a human heart transplant. We follow the organ’s journey from the body of a 19-year-old surfer named Simon (Nick T. Daly, a lanky performer with a wide smile) who’s declared brain dead after an early-morning car accident, through the intricacies of the donation process before ending up in the body of a fiftysomething writer named Claire (Heidi Blickenstaff).
The story, which Kait Kerrigan (The Great Gatsby) has adapted from a French novel by Maylis de Kerangal, unfolds like a hyperkinetic DJ’s set at a club. We never linger too long on any one character, and there’s a surprising glut of personalities introduced in a compressed 90 minutes. First, Simon’s recently divorced parents (Joaquina Kalukango and Jason Tam, empathetic but underused), turn up shell-shocked by the sudden loss of their son and the need to quickly decide whether to donate his organs.
But the show dwells for surprising lengths on other players in the transplant story, from a cocky cardiac surgeon (Drew Gehling) to a dedicated nurse (Bre Jackson) to an opera-singing transplant coordinator (Lincoln Clauss, with a commanding voice) who skips a vocal class to sit with Simon after successfully persuading the parents to agree to the donation. There’s even a millennial technician at the National Organ Donor Registry (Wren Rivera) who treats the allocation of available body parts like a real-life video game.
We also meet Simon’s DJ girlfriend (Max McKenna, with a voice like a young pop diva in the Olivia Rodrigo mold), who seems to exist primarily to remind the parents that their son was a generous soul and to provide a more literal connection to the genre of music selected for most of the score. While there’s something admirable about the ensemble nature of the show — each player gets a solo or duet, and makes the most of it, while also assuming multiple additional roles — the characterizations barely break the surface of the skin deep enough for us to make an emotional connection. That’s particularly true of Blickenstaff’s Claire, who’s introduced at a birthday party with her friends and grown children where she announces that she’s going to end her treatment and accept her fate because, as she sings, “Nobody gets out alive.” (The party breaks up when she learns that she’s getting Simon’s heart.)
We never learn much about Claire beyond her abject depression after three years on the waiting list for a heart and her apprehension about accepting the organ of a boy younger than her own kids. Blickenstaff gets a rushed solo promising to use Simon’s heart well (“I’ll be grateful for little things like coffee and fall”) but it feels generic and perfunctory, muting the impact of the surgery that ends the show on a dull downbeat.
Director Christopher Ashley brings a clinical polish to the production, which boasts a sleek set by Robert Brill that exploits Amanda Zieve’s lighting and Lucy Mackinnon’s video projections to seamlessly shift from hospital monitors to a dance club to a gamer’s Twitch screen to the ocean where Simon rides a digital sound wave atop an elevated platform that doubles as a surgical table. Curiously, Mandy Moore’s choreography consists mostly of coordinated walking with sharp turns or basic club moves performed in bloblike clumps. The Heart has the look and feel of a show that drives forward with narrative momentum, but there’s a hollowness to the material that could benefit from a consult with a skilled cardiologist. For all the propulsive energy and antiseptic precision, what’s lacking, sad to say, is heart. ★★★☆☆
THE HEART
Roundabout’s Laura Pels Theatre, Off Broadway
Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes (no intermission)
Tickets on sale through December 6 for $69 to $131