'The Heart' Off-Broadway review — if 'The Pitt' went electropop

Read our review of The Heart off Broadway, a new electronic musical written by by Anne and Ian Eisendrath and Kait Kerrigan and directed by Christopher Ashley.

Summary

• The Heart follows the 24 hours between a surfer's death and transplant of his heart into a recipient in need
• The medical procedural is set to an electrifying EDM score with aesthetics that blend nightclub and hospital
• The show is recommended for fans of medical dramas like Grey's Anatomy and The Pitt, musicals like Come From Away or KPop Demon Hunters, and organ donors and recipients

Come to the hottest club in New York City: an emergency room. Hear me out — it’s The Heart, the electropop musical by married composer/lyricists Anne Eisendrath and Ian Eisendrath and book writer/co-lyricist Kait Kerrigan. Adapting French author Maylis de Kerangal’s Réparer les Vivants, the musical fuses an operating room with EDM club aesthetics at The Laura Pels Theatre.

The Eisendraths’ high-voltage thrums are an ingenious match for the musical medical procedural. After all, both hospitals and clubs ignite adrenaline and fleeting, or maybe lasting, connections. Throughout an intermission-free 90 minutes, director Christopher Ashley paces The Heart like a relay, with proverbial batons passing from character to character — not unlike his rotating-talking-heads approach for Broadway's Come From Away.

One moment, 19-year-old Simon (Nick T. Daly) is surfing the California waves, and the next, a car accident renders him braindead. His separated parents, Marianne (Joaquina Kalukango) and Sean (Jason Tam), face the grueling decision to donate Simon’s organs, heart-wrenchingly pondered in the song “Quicksand.”

Kalukango and Tam are hit-or-miss with their material as, respectively, a cliche of an overworked mother and a dad with a distracting surfer-bro accent. An otherwise charming Daly, who sits aside as an observing spirit, doesn’t complicate Simon much further than a nice guy in living memory — there’s a lot more telling than showing his flaws. And Simon’s girlfriend, Juliette (Max McKenna), is underwritten and saddled with on-the-nose dialogue regarding her job as a DJ, an overarching metaphor.

A motif in de Kerangal’s book is chasing sensations of the flesh, and its characters have evocative, erotic interiorities. Those are sanitized here, but the marbles of universes that do exist within the medical staff — such as Drew Gehling as a charming cardiothoracic surgeon — are the lifeblood of The Heart. The book finds great humor in off-the-clock staff being interrupted by work calls, such as transplant coordinator Thomas (the divalicious countertenor Lincoln Clauss), in the middle of his wake-up and opera routine, and organ donation registry agent Marthe (Wren Rivera) logging out of their video game to match a donor to a recipient. You witness how these humans channel their passions into their jobs: Marthe treats donor/recipient matching like a puzzle game, and Thomas pours out an oratorio to those who passed.

The MPV, though, is Bre Jackson as the nurse Cordelia. In a show too breathless for applause breaks, she gets it anyway for the soulful “Right Now” as she belts and grooves around Simon’s comatose body to give him company, regardless of her supervisor’s scolding. Jackson conveys a woman with a complex relationship with the workforce while maintaining compassion.

The second to snag applause is Heidi Blickenstaff as 50-year-old heart donation recipient Claire, who releases an avalanche of anguish and comic fretfulness as she accepts her presumed premature end (“Nobody Gets Out Alive”) and her eventual struggles with wording a letter to her donor’s family (“Too Young”).

The Heart isn't all seamless incisions. Side effects include mawkishness when the show dips into an inspirational-PSA tone. The electrifying music can overexert itself, and spurts of Gareth Owen’s sound design drown out voices. And Mandy Moore’s lively choreography swings big but lands as imprecise and curiously withdrawn from effectively theatricalizing a transplant surgery. And yet, so much of the musical thunders with intoxicating rhythms that can’t be missed.

The Heart summary

There are 24 hours to transplant a heart from a braindead patient, 19-year old surfer Simon Lamar, into Claire, a 50-year-old with heart failure. The Heart follows Simon’s loved ones mourning and the medical staff preparing for the operation, all set to an electronic score.

The Heart adapts Maylis de Kerangal’s 2014 French-language novel Réparer les Vivants by transplanting the Le Havre, France setting to San Diego, California. The musical had its 2025 world premiere at San Diego's La Jolla Playhouse.

What to expect at The Heart

The many moving parts of The Heart include actors doubling up on roles and a narrating chorus delivering detailed facts about the heart and transplant procedures. Design-wise, Lucy Mackinnon’s video design also doubles up: A wavelength can be a sea wave and an EKG as projected atop a grid backdrop and behind Robert Brill’s sleek cubic set. Prognosis: The Heart is a contender for most adventurous video design this theatre season.

Musicals that show a dead subject can either present the corpse as an invisible presence (Operation Mincemeat) or an actor (Dead Outlaw). In The Heart, Simon does not stay an inert body on the hospital bed (a table which doubles as a surfboard); he’s seated to the side as an observing spirit until called into flashback scenes. There’s the added tragedy of him seemingly frozen in the way his loved ones remember him.

The Heart runs 90 minutes with no intermission and contains discussions of death and medical procedures.

What audiences are saying about The Heart

How do the charts read? On the review aggregator Show-Score, as of writing, The Heart has an 82% audience approval rating based on 126 reviews.

• "It was a beautiful musical that made you smile, laugh, and at times cry. The cast were incredible. The mother's voice and emotional connection to her character made my tears flow as freely as hers did in real life. The way they gave each actor 2 characters to portray helped to soften the material so you were not left emotionally devastated and you felt hopeful and at peace." - Show-Score user Mary M
• “Christopher Ashley’s direction keeps the action taut, but it’s Mandy Moore’s choreography that really makes the stage feel alive. She moves the actors constantly with doctors rushing, nurses crossing paths, and parents circling each other in grief. The effect is both clinical and overwhelming.” - Critic ErinMarie Reiter, reviewing the La Jolla Playhouse on BroadwayWorld
• “For me this walked the line between cheesy and great, but overall it worked for me.” - Mezzanine user Currer Bell
• “The musical sure pulls on your heartstrings, no pun intended. But it captures the deep essence of the complexities of the human stories we doctors and healthcare professionals encounter day after day.” - Instagram user @santistc

Read more audience reviews of The Heart on Show-Score.

Who should see The Heart

• Fans of medical dramas like The Pitt and Grey’s Anatomy will be interested by how the hospital setting is theatricalized, and by what doctors and nurses give to their profession.
• Fans of Maylis de Kerangal’s novel and its film adaptation Heal the Living will want to see how the story translates to the stage.
• Sharing a director with the equally hopeful yet dark-streaked Come From Away, The Heart will stir fans of that musical and its themes of interconnectedness.
• Organ donors and recipients may relate to the relationship between Simon's and Claire's families and their stories.
• Pop musicals like the megahit KPop Demon Hunter, which had its music executive produced by Ian Eisendrath, are having their time. Fans of such shows may be curious how electropop can shake up and stimulate the musical formula.

Learn more about The Heart off Broadway

It may need massaging, but The Heart pulsates with promise as an innovative electropop musical. The synchronized EDM score and medical setting create a circulatory system of human connection, where we’re all just raving in this life together as long as we can.

Learn more and get The Heart tickets on New York Theatre Guide. The Heart is playing at The Laura Pels Theatre through December 6.

Photo credit: The Heart off Broadway. (Photos by Joan Marcus)