It was a tonic leap of detachment before Thomas’ mask of professionalism came up again. Some of the production’s strongest moments involve such challenging tonal pivots; such as the appearance of a rogue actor (a terrific Wren Rivera) as the cheerful consultant who selects organ recipients using an algorithm. The show’s lyrics are often literal and include rare outliers, such as a wry joke about Juliette becoming “a side piece of a nine-foot fiberglass slab.” So did this blunt sincerity work emotionally? It certainly was. Soon my eyes burned; My chest feels tight. If the critical part of my brain sometimes resisted an obvious statement like “You are my heartbeat,” the rest of my body was fully involved.
It was impossible to resist the daring electronic anthems and ballads that married pop music wizards Anne and Ian Eisendrath co-wrote with Kerrigan’s help. Broadway musicals have spawned everything from rock and pop to hip-hop and folk. But there’s something refreshingly logical about injecting the synthetic jolt of electronic dance music into a hospital setting where vulnerable bodies are propped up by machines. The score is refreshingly artificial, from the rambunctious “Go On,” punctuated by the beeps of hospital monitors, to the kinetic “Shoot the Match,” where layers of slick digital escalation grow as thick as shellac as the consultant focuses on his match. Any repetitive rhythm becomes bait; the hum of the ocean, the hum of video games. It is an auditory vocabulary that evokes both the cold, invisible workings of neural networks and sticky bodies losing themselves in a frenzy, uniting in a heartbeat.
“Was he generous?” That’s the question Simon’s parents have to answer as they wrestle with whether to let doctors harvest their son’s organs. The show itself feels generous, open to emotion as a source of wisdom. As one of the best quotes from the series says about surfing and, by implication, almost everything in life, “You just take a wave, then you deliver it.” As anyone who has been to the emergency room knows, some clichés ring true in a crisis.
After a frustrating few years, there’s a thirst downtown right now for Broadway to get behind a great new musical. Will “Galileo” be successful? Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Warriors”? “Wanted”? In late October, a hot contender emerged: the London transfer “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” enjoyed great success there. Some critics in New York found it two-dimensional, but I loved this quirky little story about a man aging backwards. Even though it was composed with Celtic sea songs, the production actually shared a lot with “The Heart”. It’s also a mortality-obsessed countdown show, a stylized story in which actors switch roles. He also had a lyrical candor that risked cliché in pursuit of basic emotions.
However, what was most remarkable about “Button” was its structure, which, like “The Heart”, included a whole that harmoniously told the story of an individual, in this case down to the thoughts in Benjamin’s head. Both plays are part of a cadre of smart musicals, along with “Come from Away,” an earlier project directed by Ashley (which, like “Button,” has a Celtic-folk score). These demonstrations clearly focus on communities, not individuals; A hospital in “The Heart”, a fishing village in “Benjamin Button” and a rural Canadian town in “Come From Away”. These are systems romances that recall the choral storytelling of classics like “A Chorus Line” and “Sweeney Todd” or the clever identity-swapping of “Operation Mincemeat.”
There’s another play in town that uses a similar technique in a more low-key way: the “I Became We” song sequence, written by Mona Pirnot and with delightful music by Jack D. Coen. At the Linda Gross Theatre, sixteen singers stand on risers and hold green choir binders. There is a conductor and a piano. It was like church until I heard the first line, sung as solemnly as Handel’s “Messiah”: “I saw a segment on ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!’ called ‘What Do You Know About the Female Body?’ ”