Writers: Nick Blaemire and Van Hughes
Director: Will Blum
Four years after lift-off at Manhattan’s MCC Theater – extended twice, filmed for streaming – Van Hughes and Nick Blaemire’s rock-musical docu-comedy finally touches down in London, live guitars and keyboards, teddy-bear puppets to hand, and a refrain repeated like a mission countdown: “the war behind closed doors”. 40-odd dogs paid the fare, and Space Dogs is their daft, heartfelt requiem.
The pair plays politicians, scientists, an entire pack of cosmonaut strays, switching sides beneath two wall-mounted flags lit to show whose propaganda we’re inside. Blaemire’s Wernher von Braun, the Nazi rocketeer spirited into American employment after the war, earns the night’s biggest laugh with a German techno number in gurgling autotune, one arm instinctively rising toward a heil that the other must ground.
Hughes’s Chief Designer – Sergei Korolev, the Soviets’ secret genius – is a granite-faced hard-nut when the American flag glows, and, under the Soviet one, a camp, cuddly moralist, doting on his doomed pack: “We bred them, committed eugenics to make them this way. The least we could do is feed them well.” A torch to the face and an echo on the voice conjure his gulag years on The Other Palace Studio’s stage with as much spare room as Sputnik, and still get laughs. The dogs, meanwhile, hold a beauty pageant to crown the most propagandisable stray – Laika, inevitably – while a cigar-chewing wiseguy mutt assures her, with entirely unearned authority, that everything will be fine. Everything was not fine.
Both performers are in tremendous voice. But somewhere past the 45-minute mark, mission creep sets in: the zany songs turn samey, choruses come round for third and fourth orbits, and the Americans-versus-Soviets briefings repeat as though the pair trusts neither the room nor the history lesson they’d taught so well – re-explaining what the audience had already grasped. An insisted encore – “one more song,” demanded by nobody but the performers themselves – reprises a refrain already thrice heard, and Laika’s farewell soliloquy drifts, rescued only by her gold-tinfoil space cape and a ripple of ‘awws’.
A tighter final third and this eccentric production would soar; as it stands, the orbit decays. But as an act of remembrance for 40 dead dogs who stood in for millions of dead humans, it lands somewhere rather moving all the same.
Runs until 9 August 2026
