Fresh off an English-language Salome that had New York’s cognoscenti all atwitter, Heartbeat Opera turns its fizzy iconoclasm on Gounod’s Faust, a title that holds a special place in New York cultural history. The tale of the wizened intellectual who signs over his soul to the devil for a second shot at the rosebuds he neglected to gather in youth was the inaugural attraction when the Met opened in 1883—and went on to entrench itself so thoroughly there that wags (remember wags?) called the Met the Faustspielhaus. Faust’s popularity has waned considerably, but the agenda at Heartbeat is not merely to give the old chestnut another airing. Heartbeat’s artistic director Jacob Ashworth, who is conducting, and the stage director Sara Holdren, who has supplied new English dialogue, have worked up a new adaptation that harks back to Gounod’s original conception as a so-called opéra comique, with spoken dialogue. A quixotic endeavor, to be sure. A recent recording of that Ur-Faust, featuring a few numbers Gounod later cut or replaced, yields no keepers—but quixotic is what Heartbeat lives for. Count us in. —Matthew Gurewitsch