"It’s informative, in a slipshod way, but also hopelessly cheesy, packed with dad jokes, puns, silly accents and even a doggie beauty contest. 'Space Dogs' gives off the vibe of a B-grade educational children’s show — though one with the occasional vulgarity amid the bleak material...Most of the musical’s songs are pretty uniform stylistically and generically upbeat — bouncy yet forgettable numbers that contribute little to the story."
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"2/5 stars...The show gets tugged into a black hole of 'Wayne’s World'-worthy one-note jokiness and Saturday morning cartoon-style songs. Although it’s hard to knock a show for ambition, this one tries to do too much and goes slack as it moves forward and periodically punctures the fourth wall...'Space Dogs' feels like an overextended idea in this full-length form. It might shine brighter as a show of a more compact breed."
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"3/5 stars...Hughes and Blaemire's cheeky, high-energy approach never wavers. They sing 18 eclectic tunes and rocket through director Ellie Heyman's agitated stage business, never giving the characters or the audience a chance to breathe—or to feel the impact of the story's sweet-bitter journey...Hughes and Blaemire seem to genuinely adore that history was changed by dogs, but the show is all lark and no bite."
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"I found it overbearing from the start, when the two creators/performers come onto the stage and immediately start tossing toy puppies at the audience...Some of Blaemire and Hughes's songs suggest the smarter musical 'Space Dogs' could have been...Even such moments that evince an actual political and moral perspective on history, however, are overwhelmed by Blaemire and Hughes's insistent desire to entertain at all costs."
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Space Dogs illustrates the often-worrying gulf between technical skill and storytelling expertise so often seen these days… This shotgun wedding of brutal historical facts with cute puppets and musical numbers titled "Fuzziest Loneliest" and "Russian Canine Beauty Pageant" produces an entertainment of limited charm.
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"Despite being given a lavish production totally unworthy of its source material, the kindest thing that can be said about this 90-minute, intermission-less show is that Hughes and Blaemire, best friends who wrote and star in 'Space Dogs,' appear to be having fun...Musically, the 'Space Dogs' score is rudimentary at best and uninspired at worst."
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"3/5 stars...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...But a couple of acoustic guitar–playing, cowboy hat–wearing Americans simply aren’t as interesting as lovable Laika...Not surprisingly, the show’s best song is 'The Space Dogs of the Cosmodrome.'"
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Heyman and the rest of the production team quickly turn Space Dogs into an exercise of quantity over quality. More lights. More noise. More projections. More props. It's theater as sensory overload, with success measured by distraction. The major problem is that it also leads to a lot of other annoyances, with Nathan Leigh's sound design doing nothing for the intelligibility of Hughes and Blaemire's lyrics, Mary Ellen Stebbins' concert lighting occasionally blinding the audience in MCC's small off-Broadway space, and Stefania Bulbarella's numerous projections just stoking the meaningless hurly-burly.
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