No symbol is more overused in the arts than the human heart. Served cold, golden, or on one’s sleeve, it has been the stuff of countless theatrical metaphors, from the plays of Euripides to Larry Kramer. The Roundabout Theatre Company has, nonetheless, doubled down on the image for its plainly named yet surprisingly complex medical musical, The Heart. Happily, it is a gamble that pays off. Kait Kerrigan’s book mostly avoids sentimentality in favor of scientific facts and hard emotional truths, while the husband and wife team of Ian and Anne Eisendrath deliver a pulsating score, anchored in the realm of electronic dance music.

If you missed the avant-garde theater scene in New York City during the 1960s and ’70s, The Kick Inside serves as a time capsule, catapulting its audiences back to the heyday of experimental theater. Directed with a steady hand by Nicolás Noreña, this collection of 12 vignettes by a range of playwrights, from Richard Foreman to Penny Arcade, takes its viewers on a madcap linguistic, visual, and physical journey to that era, with an occasional modern touch to the retro material.

Anthropomorphism is at the center of The Dog Show: Come. Sit. Stay., David Javerbaum’s cleverly conceived work about dogs and their views of the world. Directed by Richard Israel, it’s playing at the Triad, the original home of Celebrity Autobiography. The Dog Show adopts a similar format as that hit: actors reading from scripts, mostly at stands. But it’s no less enjoyable for that: a winning cast of four helps the unflashy production breed satisfaction for its audience.