A portion of the Large Hadron Collider of CERN in Switzerland, one of the main characters of the 2013 film “Particle Fever,” on which a new musical is based.Credit...Massimo Dallaglio/Alamy
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.