THEATRICAL ARRHYTHMIA

La Jolla Playhouse has always been fairly adventurous in its programming, but its latest premiere chooses a subject that feels less like theatrical fodder than a medical case study. A human heart travels from the body of a dead teenager to a waiting recipient, and along the way the audience is asked to submit itself to an unrelenting hour and twenty minutes of music, choreography, and carefully staged grief. The idea teeters between audacity and folly, and the fact that it works at all is proof of the theatre’s willingness to gamble with both our patience and our nerves.

The cast of La Jolla Playhouse’s world-premiere musical The Heart

Zachary Noah Piser and Heidi Blickenstaff

The source is Maylis de Kerangal’s novel Réparer les Vivants (Mend the Living), a work of prose that lingers on procedure with obsessive attention yet trembles with lyricism. A 2016 film also adapted the book, carrying over its refusal to sentimentalize. Both the novel and the film dared to make the clinical poetic, and the musical inherits that rigor as well as that risk. What sang on the page and found new life in cinema is transformed again into EDM beats and pop-inflected ballads. Kait Kerrigan’s book has the same sharp angles as the machinery it describes, moving briskly from sarcasm to lament with little pause. The clipped dialogue often feels written with a stopwatch ticking in the background, which lends urgency but sometimes strips the story of lasting emotional residue.

Kenita Miller (center) and the cast

The premise insists on keeping the organ, rather than the boy, at the center of attention. The young surfer Simon is rendered brain-dead early, and after that he hovers like a half-remembered photograph, less a character than a device. His parents shoulder the emotional burden, stumbling through the impossible task of consenting to give away what remains of their son. Jason Tam and Kenita Miller give them flesh and vulnerability, though the script pushes them toward archetype rather than individuality. Heidi Blickenstaff emerges as the one who seizes the audience by the throat. Her Claire, who receives Simon’s heart, injects the production with humor and terror in equal measure, and her closing speech lands with a simplicity that no projection or choreography can match.

Jason Tam (left) and Zachary Noah

Christopher Ashley directs with the precision of a surgeon racing the clock. Mandy Moore keeps the cast in perpetual motion so that conversations resemble choreographed collisions, as if grief itself were a form of athletics. The effect is hypnotic for a time, but the constant movement begins to feel like evasion, a refusal to let any moment settle long enough to accumulate genuine weight. Robert Brill’s set gleams with antiseptic polish. White surfaces slide and rearrange with machine-like certainty, creating a vision of the hospital as dreamscape. Amanda Zieve’s lighting shifts from surgical glare to oceanic haze, while Lucy Mackinnon’s projections occasionally soar, especially the massive pulsing heart that dominates the stage. At other times they sink, as with the unfortunate video game sequence that trivializes the stakes.

Jason Tam, Kenita Miller and Lincoln Clauss

The cast works to humanize this environment. Bre Jackson, as Simon’s nurse,  brings the evening’s most galvanizing moment with a song sung directly to Simon, refusing to let him be dismissed as an empty vessel. Lincoln Clauss negotiates the harrowing role of transplant coordinator with unnerving poise, embodying the paradox of asking parents to transform loss into generosity. Paul Alexander Nolan swaggers as the surgeon Dr. Breva, so convincingly cynical that he might have stepped straight from an operating room. Zachary Noah Piser (who also played a dead son in LJP’s Redwood), as Simon, remains a sweet but elusive presence, while Max McKenna as his girlfriend drifts in and out with little consequence. The imbalance is deliberate, perhaps, but it leaves the story without a center.

Bre Jackson

The score by Ian and Anne Eisendrath is at its most effective when it refuses to sound like Broadway. The blend of electronic pulses with the rhythms of hospital monitors and ocean surf creates a soundscape that feels urgent and alien. Numbers like the father-son duet on the water suggest what the show might have achieved if it had trusted its strangeness. Too often the music retreats into the safe contours of pop musical theater, the very territory from which this story should be fleeing. Wendy Bobbitt Cavett’s music direction (of the band-less electronic score) holds the ensemble together, but the score seems reluctant to fully commit to its radical impulses.

Wren Rivera (left) and Heidi Blickenstaff

What remains is not catharsis but disturbance. The show withholds the release the audience craves. It ends abruptly, leaving behind a sensation of rupture rather than resolution. Perhaps this is intentional, a recognition that grief offers no neat arc. The effect, though, is uneven. You leave the theater acutely aware of your own heartbeat, conscious of the fragility of what sustains you, but also skeptical of the theatrical mechanics that delivered that awareness.

Paul Alexander Nolan (center) and the cast

Max McKenna (right) and the cast

The Heart is a work of contradictions. It is ambitious and unfinished, moving and clinical, generous and withholding. It asks its audience to accept an experiment that dazzles in places and frustrates in others. It is not a perfect musical, but it is undeniably alive, vibrating with the unsettling truth that life continues only through the most brutal transactions. La Jolla Playhouse has staged something that will not leave quietly. It haunts the pulse long after you step outside, making you wonder whether the throb in your chest belongs to you or to the theatre itself.

Zachary Noah Piser and Max McKenna

photos by Rich Soublet Photography

The Heart
La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego
2910 La Jolla Village Drive, La Jolla
ends on October 5, 2025
for tickets, call 858.550.1010 or visit La Jolla Playhouse