It’s a big weekend for dogs. First, there’s the much-anticipated Puppy Bowl, the Animal Planet event that plops adorable adoptable rescue pups onto a makeshift football field for a few hours of Super Bowl–esque tossing, sprinting, and tackling. And on a much smaller stage, Van Hughes and Nick Blaemire’s Space Dogs—a scrappy musical salute to the canine cosmonauts that launched the Soviet space program in the late 1950s—is opening at off-Broadway’s MCC Theater.
If you’re not a dog person, you probably won’t have much tolerance for Space Dogs, especially once Hughes and Blaemire—the only human performers in the show—start hurling stuffed animals into the audience. And if you are a dog person, bad news: You don’t get to keep the cuddly pups. (Boo!)
Speaking of cuddly pups, the real star of the show—apologies to the authors, who are working their tails (ahem) off in this Mickey-and-Judy-style piece—is Laika, a short-legged brown-and-white “street mongrel, possibly part-husky, possibly part terrier” with ears like antennae and a heart-melting head tilt. She also happens to be a stuffed animal, so Blaemire talks and sings for her, and it’s absolutely delightful. No wonder she gets her own bow. (Blaemire also plays himself, plus assorted other parts, including a German aerospace engineer and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.)
Some background: Laika flew on Sputnik 2—which the wags dubbed Muttnik—in November 1957; she made history but, alas, didn’t make it back to earth, as the scientists hadn’t yet figured out the reentry process. Future four-legged passengers were luckier than Laika: Belka and Strelka spent a day in orbit in 1960, and after their return basically became celebrities. (Strelka even gave birth to a puppy named Pushinka, Russian for Fluffy, whom Khrushchev gifted to President Kennedy’s daughter, Caroline.)
But Space Dogs largely focuses on the sweet-faced Laika and the space race of which she was an integral part. Hughes plays, among other roles, the vodka-swilling Chief Designer charged with beating the U.S. to the proverbial punch and the man who holds little Laika’s fate in his hands.
Presumably in the interest of providing a complete historical picture, the authors don’t spend all their time in the secret Soviet space lab in Kazakhstan; they also give us a glimpse into America’s early attempts to go into orbit. “After WWII, President Truman made it illegal to hire Nazis—but once we found we were losing the space race, well. Surprise, we did it anyway,” explains Nick. But a couple of acoustic guitar–playing, cowboy hat–wearing Americans simply aren’t as interesting as lovable Laika, aka “the fuzziest loneliest dog in the world” (as she sings). As Nick interjects at one point: “Hey Van can we talk about the dogs? That’s what the people are here for.” Not surprisingly, the show’s best song is “The Space Dogs of the Cosmodrome.”
Though it clocks in at just 90 minutes, Space Dogs does have a tendency to drag whenever the spotlight shifts to a human. It could have done with a little more Laika. Also: If MCC had been selling souvenir Space Dogs as we exited the theater, I’d have bought at least one.
Space Dogs opened Feb. 13, 2022, and runs through March 20 at MCC Theater. Tickets and information: mcctheater.org
