ROUNDABOUT WILL TRANSPLANT 'THE HEART'

Fresh blood for the Broadway pipeline.

EXCLUSIVE: The Roundabout Theatre Co. plans to present an innovative new musical about 24 hours in the life of a human heart, set to a pulsating electronic score.

The Heart is scheduled to open Off-Broadway at the nonprofit company’s Laura Pels Theatre at the end of October, according to a person familiar with the production. If the tryout on West 46th Street is well-received, the next stop is Broadway, where it would be among the first Broadway musicals dominated by electronic dance music (EDM).

The Roundabout’s incoming artistic director, Christopher Ashley, has been developing the show with the high-profile producers Sue Frost and Randy Adams (Come From Away).

The Heart at La Jolla Playhouse

The Heart aims to expand musical theater’s palette. “What you hear in your earbuds every day when you’re walking down the street is this heavily produced music,” co-composer Anne Eisendrath said in a video created for the La Jolla Playhouse, where the show had its premiere in August. “And it becomes the soundtrack to your life. And I was like, ‘we need to make a musical that sounds like that.’”

Adapted from Maylis de Kerangal’s novel Réparer les Vivants, the show dramatizes a race to transplant a dying surfer’s heart into a living woman. Eisendrath collaborated on the percussive score with her husband, Ian Eisendrath, who’s the executive music producer of the blockbuster Netflix movie KPop Demon Hunters. Kait Kerrigan (The Great Gatsby) wrote the book and additional lyrics.

Critic Pam Kragen wrote in the San Diego Union-Tribune that it “unfolds like a singing docudrama…At times tender and tear-inducing and at others cold and clinical, The Heart is a story about life, death, sacrifice, generosity and, ultimately, hope.”

Ashley, La Jolla’s outgoing artistic director who takes over the Roundabout this summer, will direct the show in New York, as he did at La Jolla. Programming The Heart at the Roundabout is reminiscent of Lear deBessonet beginning her tenure atop Lincoln Center Theater with Ragtime, which she first staged at New York City Center in 2024.

Best known for revivals, Roundabout hasn’t presented many new musicals since it was founded in 1965. If all goes well, The Heart will be its first new musical in memory to transfer to Broadway. The Roundabout has produced new plays that transferred, including Liberation, The Humans and Significant Other. And it’s produced new plays directly on Broadway, including Sanaz Toossi’s timely Pulitzer Prize-winning English, about Iranian adults preparing for an English language exam, which ended its run a year ago.

A Roundabout spokeswoman declined immediate comment on Wednesday. Frost didn’t respond to emails.

Frost, Adams and Stephen Reynolds are raising $14 million to $16 million for The Heart, according to a December filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. A promotional deck for prospective investors said the capitalization “includes Broadway and all developmental steps.” Frost and Adams were credited as producers of the La Jolla engagement, and are likely enhancing — or underwriting — the Roundabout run.

Frost — the chair elect of the Broadway League trade association — and Adams have an enviable track record. Of the three new Broadway musicals they have lead produced since 2009, two were hits: Come from Away — about the residents of Gander, Newfoundland, who welcomed stranded passengers following 9/11 — and Memphis, about a white D.J. who championed Black R&B in the 1950s. Ashley directed both shows, winning a Tony Award for Come From Away in 2017. Memphis won the Tony for best musical in 2010.

Were The Heart to move to Broadway, the production estimates it would require a published box office gross of $760,000 a week to break even, which is on the low end for a musical today. Like Come From Away, it’s an ensemble piece with actors playing multiple roles.

Ashley has said he will collaborate with Scott Ellis, the interim artistic director, on the 2026-27 season. The Roundabout’s longtime leader, Todd Haimes, who died in 2023 at the age of 66, left the company in a relatively strong position.

As of August 2025, it had net assets of $141 million. It controls three Broadway houses: Studio 54, the Stephen Sondheim Theatre and what’s now called the Todd Haimes — formerly the American Airlines, and before that, the Selwyn Theatre. The rare artistic director with an MBA, Haimes opportunistically signed long-term leases and acquired venues to grow the institution and to provide financial stability.

The Roundabout, like other landlords, has capitalized on the generally strong demand for theaters. In 2024-25, its rental income totaled $24 million, far eclipsing its ticket and subscription sales and accounting for nearly a third of its contributions, investment income and earned revenue.

JOEY PARNES UPDATE: In January, I reported that the producer and his production company were defendants in three lawsuits seeking a combined $730,000 in fees that allegedly went unpaid during his bruising 2022-23. That season, he was a lead producer of two short-lived Broadway flops: Bob Fosse’s Dancin’ and KPOP.

Since then, one suit has been dropped and settlement discussions are underway in another.

In the largest dispute, Parnes allegedly fell $458,000 short of the enhancement he agreed to provide Hartford Stage Co. for its June 2022 tryout of the musical Kiss My Aztec!, according to a complaint by the theater company. A week after my story ran, Hartford Stage dismissed the suit without prejudice — meaning that it is free to refile the complaint down the road.

In another case, Parnes acknowledged in court papers that Joey Parnes Productions owed $50,000 in pay and pension contributions to the orchestrator and associate orchestrator of Dancin’. Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians sued to recover the money.

On Jan. 27, a lawyer for Joey Parnes Productions requested that a federal judge extend filing deadlines because “additional time is needed for the parties to discuss settlement.” This week, Parnes Productions was granted a second extension: “The parties have been discussing settlement, and additional time will allow the parties to continue to try to resolve the issues presented amicably without the need for further Court intervention,” Parnes’ lawyer, Michelle (Min Kyung) Cho of Moses & Singer LLP, wrote in a filing.

Note: This story was updated to clarify that the Roundabout doesn’t own all its venues. It occupies the Todd Haimes, Stephen Sondheim and the Steinberg Center — which includes the Laura Pels — under long-term leases. It owns Studio 54.