There’s something very cold about The Heart, though I respect the musical’s ambition as a constantly pulsing poperetta. Anne and Ian Eisendrath’s score, while littered with cliches, is mostly successful in that regard, and EDM was never about the lyrics anyhow. But though Kait Kerrigan’s book, adapted from the French novel Réparer les vivants, purports to honor life’s preciousness by following a heart’s 24-hour journey from death to transplant (and thus rebirth), it is icy and detached to the point of inhumanity. EDM winds up being a too-appropriate medium.

To be fair, I’ve always stood completely parallel to medical dramas, which continue to grow in popularity. But I remember the moment I realized that Grey’s Anatomy, for example, is as much about the melodrama as it is about watching graphic surgical footage (something I am never trying to do), and then mini-spiraling about how that type of media has led directly to the societal obsession with true crime (an icky genre, at best) and our broader dehumanization.

There’s a fetishization of the medical profession that The Heart feeds into; one which prioritizes efficiency over benevolence with AI-startup callousness. The plot is simple: 19-year-old Simon (Nick T. Daly) dies in a car accident, and hospital staff (Lincoln Clauss, Drew Gehling, Bre Jackson, Wren Rivera) work diligently to make the best of the situation and convince his parents (Joaquina Kalukango and Jason Tam) to authorize organ donations. Simon’s girlfriend (Max McKenna) is around to humanize him and tug at our emotions, and Claire (Heidi Blickenstaff) is the dying stranger who’d given up on life just before receiving the pivotal call.

Medicine is an arena of facts over feelings, but a discomfort crept up on me while hearing Clauss’ transplant coordinator zone out from the grieving mother’s tears to note that “She’s speaking in the past tense now, it’s starting to soak in.” It’s one thing to mostly relegate Kalukango to tear-soaked distress—something she does very well and is gratefully allowed to break free from in the number “I Will Never Let You Go,” which, with her diva vocals over a thumping beat, should signal a possible career pivot into house music. But Clauss’ continuing to sing over her bordered on disrespect and undercut the scene’s emotion.

I shook that off and convinced myself to hop out of my feelings, but then a trend-chasing scene opened with a MMORPG sequence that’s halted when its gamemaster is called to duty and tasked with finding a quick recipient for the transplant. This goes into a number that gamifies that process, with the backwall projections (by Lucy Mackinnon) navigating through the healthcare mainframe, Matrix-style, as Rivera’s operator tells a possible beneficiary’s voicemail, “I’ve been trying to reach you for five minutes. 15 minutes left. Then I move on.”

It felt very much like the (ongoing) era of military training that harvested detached killers based on video game competence—the subject of the play Grounded, whose big-screen-based operatic adaptation The Heart’s production often evokes. (Robert Brill did the tech-heavy set for Christopher Ashley’s staging; Amanda Zieve designed the lighting; and Gareth Owen deserves an award for the crispness of the sound.) 

There’s a strange tech-optimism at play, all on the back of actual humanity, which is why Blickenstaff’s arrival is so welcome: she actually gets to play a character, and manages to shade her once-doomed recipient with warm existentialism (the actor’s speciality?). When we meet her Claire, she’s getting drunk on her birthday, which she believes, maybe even hopes, will be her last. “Nobody Gets Out Alive” is the name of the song; a boppy Amy Winehouse dirge that taps into the human contradiction that the rest of The Heart cannot, even if the musical itself paradoxically embodies—we can rage against the machine, our ourselves, but it has to come from within.

The Heart is scheduled through December 6, 2026 at the Laura Pels Theatre on West 46th Street in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.

There’s something very cold about The Heart, though I respect the musical’s ambition as a constantly pulsing poperetta. Anne and Ian Eisendrath’s score, while littered with cliches, is mostly successful in that regard, and EDM was never about the lyrics anyhow. But though Kait Kerrigan’s book, adapted from the French novel Réparer les vivants, purports to honor life’s preciousness by following a heart’s 24-hour journey from death to transplant (and thus rebirth), it is icy and detached to the point of inhumanity. EDM winds up being a too-appropriate medium.

To be fair, I’ve always stood completely parallel to medical dramas, which continue to grow in popularity. But I remember the moment I realized that Grey’s Anatomy, for example, is as much about the melodrama as it is about watching graphic surgical footage (something I am never trying to do), and then mini-spiraling about how that type of media has led directly to the societal obsession with true crime (an icky genre, at best) and our broader dehumanization.

There’s a fetishization of the medical profession that The Heart feeds into; one which prioritizes efficiency over benevolence with AI-startup callousness. The plot is simple: 19-year-old Simon (Nick T. Daly) dies in a car accident, and hospital staff (Lincoln Clauss, Drew Gehling, Bre Jackson, Wren Rivera) work diligently to make the best of the situation and convince his parents (Joaquina Kalukango and Jason Tam) to authorize organ donations. Simon’s girlfriend (Max McKenna) is around to humanize him and tug at our emotions, and Claire (Heidi Blickenstaff) is the dying stranger who’d given up on life just before receiving the pivotal call.

Medicine is an arena of facts over feelings, but a discomfort crept up on me while hearing Clauss’ transplant coordinator zone out from the grieving mother’s tears to note that “She’s speaking in the past tense now, it’s starting to soak in.” It’s one thing to mostly relegate Kalukango to tear-soaked distress—something she does very well and is gratefully allowed to break free from in the number “I Will Never Let You Go,” which, with her diva vocals over a thumping beat, should signal a possible career pivot into house music. But Clauss’ continuing to sing over her bordered on disrespect and undercut the scene’s emotion.

I shook that off and convinced myself to hop out of my feelings, but then a trend-chasing scene opened with a MMORPG sequence that’s halted when its gamemaster is called to duty and tasked with finding a quick recipient for the transplant. This goes into a number that gamifies that process, with the backwall projections (by Lucy Mackinnon) navigating through the healthcare mainframe, Matrix-style, as Rivera’s operator tells a possible beneficiary’s voicemail, “I’ve been trying to reach you for five minutes. 15 minutes left. Then I move on.”

It felt very much like the (ongoing) era of military training that harvested detached killers based on video game competence—the subject of the play Grounded, whose big-screen-based operatic adaptation The Heart’s production often evokes. (Robert Brill did the tech-heavy set for Christopher Ashley’s staging; Amanda Zieve designed the lighting; and Gareth Owen deserves an award for the crispness of the sound.) 

There’s a strange tech-optimism at play, all on the back of actual humanity, which is why Blickenstaff’s arrival is so welcome: she actually gets to play a character, and manages to shade her once-doomed recipient with warm existentialism (the actor’s speciality?). When we meet her Claire, she’s getting drunk on her birthday, which she believes, maybe even hopes, will be her last. “Nobody Gets Out Alive” is the name of the song; a boppy Amy Winehouse dirge that taps into the human contradiction that the rest of The Heart cannot, even if the musical itself paradoxically embodies—we can rage against the machine, our ourselves, but it has to come from within.

The Heart is scheduled through December 6, 2026 at the Laura Pels Theatre on West 46th Street in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.

My YouTube algorithm loves nothing more than to routinely offer up, for my viewing pleasure, pivotal courtroom scenes from the 1992 film adaption of A Few Good Men. And I love nothing more than hitting “Play” on every single one: 

“The Soldier Breaks, and Confesses.”

“Murder, or Just Following Orders??” 

And, of course: “Jack Nicholson’s Legendary Courtroom Outburst!!!”

In all honesty, I’m scared to contemplate how many times I’ve rewatched these legal skirmishes, snippets from director Rob Reiner’s highly watchable film adaptation of Aaron Sorkin’s breakout 1989 play of the same name. 

A Few Good Men is early Sorkin, written years before the West Wing creator's name became a genre unto itself. Yet many of the key Sorkin characteristics are already present: rat-a-tat rhythms, rapid fire rejoinders, the struggle for decency in a crooked and amoral world. (Early warning signs of sanctimony and self-righteousness are also detectable, if not yet overpowering.) 

But Sorkin’s later talent for crisp, layered  characterization (these days, again lost) is not yet so present. So the best way to experience 37-year-old play—and even more so its handsome, old-fashioned film adaptation—is as a tightly constructed, expertly paced legal drama. It is formulaic, sure, but Sorkin works that formula to perfection. Every cross-examination is electrifying; every witness stand confession, a giddy thrill. 

Yet for all the strengths of Lincoln Center Theater’s sleek new revival of Sorkin’s military drama, at the Vivian Beaumont through January 10, the biggest letdown is how leaden those same courtroom battles suddenly feel. The scenes are certainly the greatest failing of Michael Arden’s frequently workmanlike staging, which draws out interesting nuances along the edges of Sorkin’s text but fails to animate its core dramatic questions. 

The intent of Arden’s production, I think, is to find contemporary relevance in Sorkin’s (not particularly timely) play by drawing out its ideas around the United States military, an institution depicted here as rotting from the inside, choked of any honor by depraved leadership whose obsession with outward displays of might has overwhelmed all sense and morality. 

Certainly that is the intriguing approach taken by headlining star Bradley Whitford, a Sorkin regular who inherits the villainous role of Colonel Nathan R. Jessup from screen legend Jack Nicholson. Whitford’s take on Jessup is a far cry from Nicholson’s, who embraced the character’s near-cartoonish wickedness. A stunted Whitford scowls and grunts, and speaks coarsely, but he rarely yells. His Jessup feels closer to an overgrown man child, something almost pathetic to witness—the product of a broken system, rather than an outright monster. 

All of the monstrousness is reserved for Jessup’s no. 2 man, First Lieutenant Jonathan James Kendrick, a beastly figure whose mind has been warped by Christian nationalist ideals. Kendrick is the closest the play has to a Hegseth-alike, so Arden naturally zeroes in on him, suggesting the real villain will be found in the next generation of military leadership. John Zdrojeski goes full Sergeant Hartman in the role, and while it is hardly a subtle performance, his work lingers in the mind.

The problem for Arden and company is that, a few intriguing ideas aside, Sorkin’s play isn’t really built for complexity of this manner. It is a David and Goliath story at heart, and efforts at deeper probing aren’t served by a text that, ultimately, is built to entertain. 

All that to say: if the courtroom drama flops, the whole thing dies. The play’s second act, spent almost entirely on legal machinations, feels sluggish and listless in Arden’s hands. In the film, Kevin Bacon provided some essential humanity for these scenes as opposing counsel Captain Jack Ross, his warm friendship with our hero, defense counsel Lt. Daniel Kaffee, complicating the proceedings in intriguing ways. But the very talented Michael Oberholtzer is oddly cold in the role, and finds no natural chemistry with lead performer Tom Blyth. 

Not that Blyth finds any natural chemistry with anyone on stage. The young star’s talent is without question— excelled as a young Coriolanus Snow in the latest Hunger Games prequel—but Blyth feels miscast in a role played with easy, unforced charm by Tom Cruise on screen. The English actor is, by contrast, a tense and unrelaxing stage presence. One feels the deliberate effort in every word and movement, his stiffness suggesting an actor not yet comfortable on stage—an issue, since Lieutenant Saniel Kaffee is meant to be very, very “at ease,” to a fault. 

Elsewhere, a cast of highly capable performers do what they can with what Sorkin has to offer. Krysta Rodriguez is endearingly awkward as the crusading Lieutenant Commander Joanne Galloway, but even with rewrites, the role remains underwritten, and Galloway is sidelined in the second act. Thom Sesma struggles to find depth in Major Markinson, a walking plot device. A steely Lavel Schley can’t reconcile the contradictions of Harold Dawson, one of the accused marines. 

But there are highlights; young Colin Kelly-Sordelet is excellent as Louden Downey, the other accused soldier, playing Downey’s guilelessness with a heartbreaking simplicity. And a very funny Nick Blaemiere brings some welcome warmth to the proceedings as Kaffee’s co-counsel Sam Weinberg. The character comes through clearly as the play’s conscience on stage, far more than in Reiner’s film. 

A solidly built piece of entertainment, Few Good Men is hardly a tough sit, and looks good on the Vivian Beaumont stage. The suffocating set, by Dane Laffrey, overwhelms its characters in intriguing ways. But the play did not demand to be staged today, and it shows. 

A Few Good Men is now in performance at Lincoln Center Theatre. For tickets and more information, visit here.