Dear Friends,

So many of my favorite musicals have an element of the unexpected. Take Sweeney Todd, Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s 1979 musical about a murderous barber whose victims end up sold as meat pies. On paper, it sounds – to put it mildly – like a difficult sell. And yet it’s deservedly one of the most-loved musicals of all time.

Although the characters in Kait Kerrigan, Anne Eisendrath and Ian Eisendrath’s musical The Heart are far more invested in saving lives with scalpels than in ending them with straight razors, the show’s premise initially seems similarly hard to wrap one’s head around: 24 hours in the life of a heart. And yet the uniqueness of this set-up ends up creating new and unexpected material that isn’t like any other musical I’ve worked on.

To begin with, there’s the beautiful symmetry between story and music. Anne and Ian’s electronic-driven score is eclectic and propulsive, evoking the sonic waves and cycles that align with elements of the show: the sounds of hospital machinery, the rolling waves on a beach, the soundtrack of a nightclub, the beats of a heart. These rhythms, coupled with the compressed 24-hour timeline, feel natural in a show that’s not just about mortality, but about the ways we choose to spend our time while we’re alive.

In this moment, that feels like the biggest gift this show can offer: it invites us to consider what we owe our fellow human beings, even (and perhaps especially) those we may never meet; it asks what our shared, built-in responsibility is to each other; it champions the ideas of patience and generosity; it instills an intrinsic belief of our individual worth, of our capacity to add something positive to the world. And because of the skill of my remarkable collaborators – including Kait, Anne, Ian and choreographer Mandy Moore, whose playful theatrical imagination literally animates the show – it does so with both humor and, well, heart.

CHRISTOPHER ASHLEY

The Rich Family Artistic Director of La Jolla Playhouse