Can the Higgs Boson Shine on Broadway?

Dennis Overbye

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 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 produced by David Kaplan, a film student turned physicist at Johns Hopkins University, and directed by 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.

“What I think is so beautiful about the story is these folks that were working on a problem that had a pretty high chance of failure,” she added. “That’s beautiful. That’s amazing. We should all aspire to that.” The world’s biggest and most expensive science experiment entered reality in 2002, when construction began on the Large Hadron Collider, a 17-mile-long circular tunnel outside Geneva, operated by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. The goal: to smash together subatomic particles called protons, which compose the heart of ordinary matter, and to hopefully locate a Higgs particle in the debris.

The particle was first theorized to exist in the 1960s by Peter Higgs, an English physicist. Its discovery would explain why some subatomic particles have mass, and why there is diversity and life in the universe. Failure to find the particle would relegate much of modern physics to the wastebasket.

From 2006 to 2012 Dr. Kaplan and Dr. Levinson shot about 500 hours of film, following a half-dozen characters including Fabiola Gianotti, the steely leader of the team, and Monica Dunford, a young experimentalist. The finished film brought to life the dreams, disappointments and triumphs of a handful of physicists who were betting their careers and their financial and political capital on conjuring an ephemeral particle.

Along the way, in 2008, an electrical explosion damaged the collider, requiring months of expensive repairs. But that delay set the stage for a fairy-tale ending: On July 4, 2012, the Higgs revealed itself, making global headlines and earning a Nobel Prize in Physics for Dr. Higgs, who died this year, and François Englert, who had independently proposed the same particle. “Particle Fever” won a

communication award in 2015 from the National Academies of Sciences.

Roney is the founder and chief executive of ROCO Films, which distributed “Particle Fever.” She first saw it in 2013 at a film festival in Sheffield, England and fell in love with the idea of making a musical version, much to the surprise of Dr. Levinson and Dr. Kaplan, who gave their blessings anyway. “It’s already infused with the elements that make a musical memorable and desirable,” Roney said over Zoom. “It has universal themes of humankind trying to understand the meaning of our lives and our place in the universe. The story celebrates the best in humanity — collaboration, curiosity.”

The documentary, she said, “did a great job of explaining some physics concepts. But I thought that the bigger concepts can best be communicated by music nonverbally. So that was the idea.” She added: “Musicals for me are heart-opening.” When done well, “there’s this swell that you feel,” she said, a “shared experience with the audience. You just don’t get that anywhere else.”

Ms. Kingery, a co-producer of the Broadway show “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812,” met Dr.

Levinson at a gathering in New York. He mentioned that his distributor had the insane idea to turn the film into a musical. “What’s her phone number?” Ms. Kingery asked him. “And that’s where the universe gave me Megan, who is the expert on how to do this,” Ms. Roney said on Zoom. They found themselves on the same page: Ms. Roney, who lives in California, knew film; Ms. Kingery lives in New York and knew theater.

“I think one of the greatest things you can feel in a theater is surprise,” Ms. Kingery said. “I want to be shown something I can’t imagine would work.” She added, “I ended up loving these people and their journey, and it was something new to me.”

For both producers, Hwang was their first choice to write the show. Ms. Kingery pitched the story to him over coffee one day, then waited. “It took a year to get my head around how to tell this story,” Hwang said.

He had collaborated with Philip Glass and Brian Greene, a physicist at Columbia University, on a film in 2017 for the World Science Festival called “Icarus at the Edge of Time,” about a boy who goes too close to a black hole. Even still, particle physics felt like a leap too far. “I felt unmoored,” Hwang said. “What is a boson?” (He then confessed that he had just finished watching a YouTube video by Dr. Greene on the subject.)

In the meantime, the producers enlisted Ms. Sarnak to write the lyrics; her recent credits include “The Lonely Few,” Off Broadway at MCC Theater, and “Galileo: A Rock Musical,” at Berkeley Rep. She had studied biochemistry at Harvard and grown up surrounded by physicists and mathematicians in

Princeton. Hwang found that reassuring. “Oh, somebody is in the know here with some degree of expertise,” he said.

Filling out the creative roster is McCreary, a composer of movie and television scores, including “Battlestar Galactica,” and a recipient of an Emmy and a couple of BAFTA awards. This is his first stage musical. The director is Leigh Silverman, who directed the musical “Suffs,” for which its creator Shania Taub, won two Tony Awards this year, for the book and score. Ms. Silverman has worked with Hwang before, including on “Yellow Face,” a semi-autobiographical play headed for Broadway this autumn.

This was not the first time that Hwang had come to her with an idea that seemed potentially impossible.

“I’m not a science person,” she said. “But I do understand what it is like trying to make something that will change the world.” A decade in, the team’s musical ambitions are still just at the starting line. Bringing a production to Broadway takes $20 million, on average, most of which does not land until the end of development, when investors can see the polished work.

“We joke that probably the only thing harder than trying to build a Large Hadron Collider is trying to make a musical about the Large Hadron,” Ms. Kingery said. Ms. Roney said, “We sometimes laugh with a potential investor, and we say, You know, this is going to be the greatest Broadway musical ever about particle physics. But you know, the reality is, this is going to be success because it’s a musical about ——” Ms. Kingery broke in: “human beings who happened to do particle physics.”