THE HEART: An Icy Musical, DNR – Review

There’s something very cold about The Heart, though I respect the musical’s ambition as a constantly pulsing poperetta. Anne and Ian Eisendrath’s score, while littered with cliches, is mostly successful in that regard, and EDM was never about the lyrics anyhow. But though Kait Kerrigan’s book, adapted from the French novel Réparer les vivants, purports to honor life’s preciousness by following a heart’s 24-hour journey from death to transplant (and thus rebirth), it is icy and detached to the point of inhumanity. EDM winds up being a too-appropriate medium.

To be fair, I’ve always stood completely parallel to medical dramas, which continue to grow in popularity. But I remember the moment I realized that Grey’s Anatomy, for example, is as much about the melodrama as it is about watching graphic surgical footage (something I am never trying to do), and then mini-spiraling about how that type of media has led directly to the societal obsession with true crime (an icky genre, at best) and our broader dehumanization.

There’s a fetishization of the medical profession that The Heart feeds into; one which prioritizes efficiency over benevolence with AI-startup callousness. The plot is simple: 19-year-old Simon (Nick T. Daly) dies in a car accident, and hospital staff (Lincoln Clauss, Drew Gehling, Bre Jackson, Wren Rivera) work diligently to make the best of the situation and convince his parents (Joaquina Kalukango and Jason Tam) to authorize organ donations. Simon’s girlfriend (Max McKenna) is around to humanize him and tug at our emotions, and Claire (Heidi Blickenstaff) is the dying stranger who’d given up on life just before receiving the pivotal call.

Medicine is an arena of facts over feelings, but a discomfort crept up on me while hearing Clauss’ transplant coordinator zone out from the grieving mother’s tears to note that “She’s speaking in the past tense now, it’s starting to soak in.” It’s one thing to mostly relegate Kalukango to tear-soaked distress—something she does very well and is gratefully allowed to break free from in the number “I Will Never Let You Go,” which, with her diva vocals over a thumping beat, should signal a possible career pivot into house music. But Clauss’ continuing to sing over her bordered on disrespect and undercut the scene’s emotion.

I shook that off and convinced myself to hop out of my feelings, but then a trend-chasing scene opened with a MMORPG sequence that’s halted when its gamemaster is called to duty and tasked with finding a quick recipient for the transplant. This goes into a number that gamifies that process, with the backwall projections (by Lucy Mackinnon) navigating through the healthcare mainframe, Matrix-style, as Rivera’s operator tells a possible beneficiary’s voicemail, “I’ve been trying to reach you for five minutes. 15 minutes left. Then I move on.”

It felt very much like the (ongoing) era of military training that harvested detached killers based on video game competence—the subject of the play Grounded, whose big-screen-based operatic adaptation The Heart’s production often evokes. (Robert Brill did the tech-heavy set for Christopher Ashley’s staging; Amanda Zieve designed the lighting; and Gareth Owen deserves an award for the crispness of the sound.) 

There’s a strange tech-optimism at play, all on the back of actual humanity, which is why Blickenstaff’s arrival is so welcome: she actually gets to play a character, and manages to shade her once-doomed recipient with warm existentialism (the actor’s speciality?). When we meet her Claire, she’s getting drunk on her birthday, which she believes, maybe even hopes, will be her last. “Nobody Gets Out Alive” is the name of the song; a boppy Amy Winehouse dirge that taps into the human contradiction that the rest of The Heart cannot, even if the musical itself paradoxically embodies—we can rage against the machine, our ourselves, but it has to come from within.

The Heart is scheduled through December 6, 2026 at the Laura Pels Theatre on West 46th Street in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.