Musicals, But Make It Weird: The Heart, Midnight, and I Became We

Watching a new musical often feels like standing at the sidelines of an egg-and-spoon race: The challenge of balancing song, dance, plot, and theme is so significant that you’re impressed if a creative team makes it to the finish line without spilling yolk everywhere. Only then do you start to wonder if they’ve made good time — or, rather, if all the gyroscopic work of keeping a musical together has led to anything. That’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot this fall, as we face a skittish year for new musicals on Broadway and a bubbling of new work in smaller houses that’s high on technique but sprinting in odd, less than fully considered directions.

At The Heart, you’ll witness a show with one extremely wobbly premise that impresses simply by virtue of never totally disappointing you. And truly, a lot could go wrong with this idea: Developed at the La Jolla Playhouse by its director Christopher Ashley, who has brought it with him as he’s taken over at the Roundabout, it’s an adaptation of the French novel Réparer les Vivants, about a heart transplant, set to an electronic-dance-music score by the married duo of Anne and Ian Eisendrath. (Kait Kerrigan, credited with The Heart’s book, also contributed additional lyrics.) The connection between medicine and EDM is awfully tenuous. As justification, we’re encouraged to think about the pulse of a heart; Simon (Nick T. Daly), the 19-year-old potential organ donor, rendered brain dead in a sudden accident on a drive home from surfing, also has a mopey girlfriend (Max McKenna) who is a D.J.

Ashley, like anyone who has ever had to manage an aux cord, knows that tempo can often be more important to keeping a party going than coherence. His relentlessly paced staging — Ashley, who won a Tony for directing Come From Away, is fond of cutting off applause by making one song barrel as quickly into the next as possible — keeps the show spinning forward through a plot that abounds in medical-soap cliches. (If you had told me this was an adaptation of an episode of Grey’s Anatomy or The Pitt I had never seen, I would believe you.) Simon’s hospitalization unites his estranged parents, played by the always-nice-to-encounter Joaquina Kalukango and Jason Tam, who have differing opinions about whether to take him off life support. We see vignettes from a set of familiar hospital types, like an overworked charge nurse (Bre Jackson), a preening administrator (Lincoln Clauss), and a hotshot surgeon (Drew Gehling). The actors all double in other roles, though they’re all pretty distinctive performers, so it is funny to see Gehling’s long-limbed presence, for instance, trying to fit in among a crowd of ravers in a party scene. The sharpest character study lies in the potential recipient of Simon’s heart, a woman who has all but given up on having a future but then finds herself at the top of a transplant list, suddenly lucky enough to get a new life. She’s played with swagger and rough edge by [title of show]’s Heidi Blinkenstaff. Her waltz-like aria of despair, “Nobody Gets Out Alive,” that lands about two-thirds of the way through The Heart’s single act, stops the show in large part because Blinkenstaff knows how to take her time with the material. In a production that’s metronome-precise to a fault, she adds nuance and syncopation.

That seamlessness is The Heart’s great advantage and its disappointment. Like a vital organ bagged up on ice, the thing is impeccably packaged but only sort of alive. The Eisendraths’ score, rendered pristinely through Gareth Owen’s sound design, lends a trancelike propulsion, give or take a few whiffs — as an employee at the organ-donor registry, Wren Rivera tries hard, but there’s not much to get out of a song where their character furiously pages through a database. And the choreography by La La Land’s Mandy Moore (no, not her) keeps bodies flowing through space like pulsing blood. In the process of seeing The Heart, I was never bored but never shaken up either. The closest the show came to shocking was during a sequence in which it dabbles in electronic opera — via Clauss’s impressive countertenor — by way of a dream Kalukango’s character has about a dead knight laid to rest. There, it touches on something odd and arcane, the holiness to which we ascribe our bodies, and the power and discomfort that comes with knowing we have found a way to cheat their decay. There’s a searching quality there that the rest of The Heart lacks in its overwhelming of predetermination. Shock us more, please. Bring out the defibrillator.

If shock is what you want from a musical, though, you could do worse than Midnight, a grandiose project written by, directed by, and starring Toderick Hall, a multi-hyphenate singer, dancer, reality-show contestant, YouTuber, and friend of seemingly every celebrity he has ever met. His show consists of his channeling all his talent — also, a significant amount of his own money, as he’s also a lead producer — and charging, spoon and egg metaphorically in hand, into a wall. It’s a nearly three-hour, almost-entirely-sung-through love story set in the antebellum South about gay romance between an enslaved Black man, played by Hall, and a white master (Jeremy Beloate). Oh, and it’s sort of a re-creation of Cinderella. With magic spells.

To Hall’s credit, he sure can sing and dance, and he’s got an ear for tempo and rhyme. (Also an odd fondness for lyrics that involve spreading things like butter.) He’s assembled a talented cast, too — more than one member of the ensemble will toss off a vocal run mid-song like it’s nothing — but he seems to have little sense of how to kill his darlings, or any purchase on his incredibly combustible material. (Midnight has, inevitably, sparked controversy online, and a defense from Hall himself.) It’s as if Hall has studied Hamilton — soaking up Lin-Manuel Miranda’s flow, Thomas Kail’s direction, and Andy Blankenbuehler’s choreography, all of which he imitates here — then spent a lot of time rewatching the Brandy Cinderella, and then overheard someone discuss Slave Play or Octavia Butler’s Kindred and decided he was ready to craft his own take on sex and race in America. It’s not that it’s impossible to render a compelling treatment of the story Hall wants to tell. Yet I kept thinking, as I watched it, about the pitiless sequence in Caryl Phillips’s novel Crossing the River, in which a white master imagines himself to be in love with his slave, and receives no grace for it. But though Hall’s dramatic ambition is large, his thematic ambition is slim: The musical lands on lessons that are naïvely pat, and then Hall closes the show with an odd lecture on numerology. What are we supposed to do with the information that slavery lasted for 246 years, and those numbers add up to 12?

That desire to see structure and order in his subject may be the root of what limits Hall. For all of Midnight’s sprawl, the show is most constrained by its creator’s desire for neatness. Midnight is full of clocks and mirrors, and Hall often structures songs and plot points around countdowns to midnight, when his lovers meet in secret. He also has cast an even number of white and Black actors, a decision that allows for a second-act twist — this is where the magic kicks in — in which everyone swaps roles. Hall wants to extract simple meaning from that reversal — that we could learn a lot by walking in each other’s shoes, a repeated aphorism because of the Cinderella of it all. But he hasn’t got his arms around the baked-in inequity and the incomprehensible horror of the subject he’s talking about, and you can feel his audience reacting nervously and uncertainly to that swap. A richer, messier version of this show, if Hall wants to make it, would have to break open its patterns. There’s more than a mirror between the oppressor and oppressed.

Mona Pirnot’s I Became We isn’t strictly a musical, though it also isn’t strictly in any familiar dramatic form, and it’s very much an experiment in how a balancing act can be sustained—specifically, between intimacy and distance. Pirnot has written a first-person monologue and then, with the composer Jack D. Coen and director Sarah Benson, shattered it into a sixteen-voice choir that sings her observations about being a playwright in your mid-thirties, anxious about your career, and, possibly, expanding your family, all in multipart harmony. In Coen and Pirnot’s rendering, the quotidian experience of rushing between meetings and coffee becomes as stately as an oratorio.

It’s typical, in a Pirnot project, to not be certain how exactly she’ll speak to you. In the frustrating remove that was I Love You So Much I Could Die, she performed with her back to the crowd through speech-to-text. In the whirligig of I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan, which I loved, she had one actor (David Greenspan, of course) perform a group dinner between herself and her friends. As a continuing project in depersonalization, I Became We lands somewhere between the two. I was alternatively moved and frustrated, felt myself focusing in and out like a phone camera trying to recognize a face. The joke of Pirnot’s construction — isn’t it funny I’m having a choir sing about small things, like crying while watching an Adam Sandler movie on a plane  — gives her an excuse to dwell too long on observations that could be relegated to a nice Shouts & Murmurs essay, and allows Coen’s score to be less compelling than it could, because it is standing in for “music” in quotes, rather than just being music. But even if you sense that her talk about her relationship to her mother may be building somewhere, the bigness of her conceit sneaks up on you. Before long, Pirnot and her choir are plumbing deep thoughts about loneliness and individuality, the extent to which it’s possible in this life to go it alone. By I Became We’s end, what I was feeling wasn’t nervous remove but overwhelming sentimentality. Pirnot does not land the thing with her best-honed gesture — a piece of vocal arrangement that introduces a new young voice to the choir and yanks the heartstrings — but she does alight on a big subject worth singing about.

The Heart is at the Roundabout’s Laura Pels Theatre through December 6.
Midnight is at the Daryl Roth Theatre through January 3.
I Became We is at the Atlantic’s Linda Gross Theater through November 22.