The wondrous new musical “The Heart” begins with the kind of tragedy that could easily have sent a lesser show into schmaltzy sentimentality: After a surfing session, Simon, 19, crashes his car and ends up in a hopeless coma, brain-dead and hooked up to machines. It is the end of Simon. His story, however, continues.
“The Heart,” which opened Thursday at the Laura Pels Theater, is something of a miracle: a full-steam-ahead, funny, gut-wrenching show about death and life held aloft by a superb ensemble that includes Joaquina Kalukango and Heidi Blickenstaff. Crucially, the show’s bold musical choices make Christopher Ashley’s Roundabout Theater Company production feel bracingly fresh. (He also premiered the project last year at La Jolla Playhouse, where he was artistic director before departing for Roundabout.) The score, by the married team of Anne and Ian Eisendrath, often deploys the pounding pulses of electronic dance music. As it turns out, a style obsessed with tempo, measured by beats per minute, is perfectly compatible with a story that revolves around a heart.
The source novel by the French writer Maylis de Kerangal takes place over 24 hours and is incredibly dense, with words pouring out in a torrent. Remarkably, the show’s book writer, Kait Kerrigan (on firmer ground here than on her Fitzgerald adaptation for “The Great Gatsby”), maintains that sense of urgency: Relocated to San Diego from Normandy, those 24 hours take up just 90 minutes.
Over that span, we meet Simon’s divorced parents: Marianne (Kalukango, a Tony Award winner for “Paradise Square,” steady yet still vulnerable) and Sean (Jason Tam, who could sharpen the character’s aging Valley boy cadence). Simon’s girlfriend, Juliette (Max McKenna), is a D.J. Through flashbacks, we even learn enough about Simon himself (Nick T. Daly) to miss him.
And of course there is the medical personnel, like the nurse Cordelia (Bre Jackson, making the most of her big solo, “Right Now”), overwhelmed by mounting issues at home but warm and in control at work, and the entertainingly confident cardiothoracic surgeon Dr. Breva (Drew Gehling, changing specialties after playing a gynecologist in “Waitress”). Fairly stock characters on the page, they have a vibrant individuality onstage.
The transplant coordinator, Thomas (Lincoln Clauss), has the delicate task of persuading Marianne and Sean to authorize the recovery of Simon’s organs to help ailing people. Among them is Claire (Blickenstaff, amusingly tart), a 50-year-old who has been waiting three years for a new heart and has decided to accept death.
Kerrigan has made wise choices in her streamlining of de Kerangal’s dizzying gush of facts, viewpoints and philosophical musings. She edited out some characters, including the two friends of Simon’s who survive the crash, and compressed steps, like the travel involved in the heart transplant.
Yet the show preserves the novel’s unrelenting momentum with a seamless integration of the components parts — acting, movement, singing, design — into a coherent whole that is always in motion.
That drive is evident in the score (conducted and played by the music director Wendy Bobbitt Cavett), which eschews stasis even in the slower, more self-reflective songs.
Juliette’s laptop sports stickers for the E.D.M. acts Kaskade and Swedish House Mafia, which are good reference points for some numbers — this is the rare new musical that actually sounds as if it was written in our century.
It’s a radically different approach from another show that hangs on medical procedures, the William Finn-James Lapine chamber musical “A New Brain” (1998), but it is just as emotionally and theatrically effective. Evenly apportioned among the characters, the songs effortlessly provide personal and factual background without hitting us over the head. In “Strike the Match,” for example, Marthe (Wren Rivera) — an employee at an organ-registry organization whom we’d seen leading a role-playing session as game master — sounds almost giddy from the rush of matching organ and recipient. In a few minutes, Marthe is a fully fleshed-out person.
The choreography by Mandy Moore (Taylor Swift’s Eras tour, the upcoming Broadway show “Dolly: A True Original Musical”) is deceivingly self-effacing: It’s more about integrating movement into the flow of visuals and beats than creating numbers per se, and this restraint feels organically right. Ashley and Moore orchestrate a kinetic ballet of characters and actors with clarity — which is necessary here since the cast members take on supporting roles in addition to their main ones.
This fluidity extends to the visual identity. Robert Brill’s functional set makes good use of simple props (an operating table can also be a surf board) and largely serves as a canvas for Lucy Mackinnon’s video design and Amanda Zieve’s lighting. The projections just as effectively suggest the warmth of the outdoors and the high-tech cold of a hospital.
One thing can become another, “The Heart” says in style and substance. Held aloft by a buoyant beat, this show couldn’t be a more welcome message right now.
The Heart Through Dec. 6 at the Laura Pels Theater, Manhattan; roundabouttheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.
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