A musical about particle physics is under development, with David Henry Hwang, the playwright behind “M. Butterfly.”
On a recent Friday afternoon in a basement room in Midtown Manhattan, a dozen musicians and actors stood behind a line of microphones and broke into song about particle physics. Urged along by a piano in the corner, their voices blended at times in a heavenly lament about cosmic ignorance and the search for the Higgs boson, a fleck of energy thought to be key to understanding the evolution of the universe.
If you think particle physics is an unpromising subject for a Broadway musical, you’re not alone. David Henry Hwang, the playwright of “M. Butterfly” fame, was unmoved when the idea was first pitched to him several years ago. “It was such an unlikely idea,” he said.
But that was then.
The basement performance, for a small crowd of Broadway insiders, investors and friends, was the first private reading of a new musical with a story by Mr. Hwang, and music and lyrics by Bear McCreary and Zoe Sarnak. The show recounts one of the biggest events in physics this century: the discovery in 2012 of the Higgs boson and the people behind it.
The production, still nascent, is based on “Particle Fever,” an award-winning documentary film in 2013 directed by David Kaplan, a film student turned physicist at Johns Hopkins University, and Mark Levinson, a physicist turned filmmaker.
The minireveal in June was an important first step for Megan Kingery and Annie Roney, the producers, who have spent the past decade trying to forge the unlikely material into what they hope will eventually become a Broadway musical.
“It’s been a long time coming, and it has a long way to go,” Ms. Kingery said recently during a Zoom interview with Ms. Roney.