Heather Christian, whose mind-blowing, multidimensional music seems to arrive from a studio deep in the universe, was the obvious and thrilling choice to compose the score for a stage adaptation of “A Wrinkle in Time.” After all, the 1962 Madeleine L’Engle novel that the show is based on, a classic of both children’s literature and science fiction, is about a girl’s adventures in hyperspace, and Christian, in works including “Oratorio for Living Things” and “I Am Sending You the Sacred Face,” gives the distinct impression of having made such journeys herself. Certainly she has brought back riches from the far reaches of her ear that few other theater composers would dare to imagine.
She does so again with “A Wrinkle in Time,” providing an exhaustingly beautiful score for a show, directed by Lee Sunday Evans, that is otherwise just exhausting. Playing at the Arena Stage in Washington through July 20, and filled with wonders, it features some first-rate performances from a vocally splendid cast but is far too overloaded and unvaried to fulfill its promise.
That may be a problem built into the rich underlying material. (Other adapters, notably the filmmaker Ava DuVernay, have not done it justice either.) L’Engle’s plot about Meg Murry’s trek through space to rescue her father is complicated enough, with its witchlike trio of spiritual guides, its good and evil planets and its time warps called tesseracts. But it is much more than that: It is a moral bildungsroman, as Meg, encountering the worst of the world, must mature enough to confront it.
The musical’s book, by the playwright Lauren Yee, is faithful to a fault. As in the L’Engle, Meg (Taylor Iman Jones) is an angry and disaffected seventh grader; she is often in trouble at school, especially in math class, for refusing to “show her work.” Two years since her father’s disappearance, she and her brother, Charles Wallace, an intense little genius, have formed a closed circle of support and empathy under the loving eye of their stalwart mother. It takes some daring on Meg’s part merely to allow the circle to open enough to admit one newcomer: a popular boy from school, Calvin O’Keefe.
There the story might have stalled out as a middle school romance were it not for the arrival of the three witches: Mrs. Whatsit (Amber Gray), Mrs. Which (Vicki Lewis) and Mrs. Who (Stacey Sargeant). It is they who explain how the opportunities of the tesseract might be exploited as a shortcut to finding Mr. Murry in the vast space-time of the universe. The rest of the show is concerned with the search, as the three children “tesser” repeatedly, along the way confronting a force called It that threatens to seduce the world into a coma of complacency.
At first the production establishes the story’s parameters efficiently, avoiding the clichés enshrined in the rule book of commercial musical theater. Gray makes Mrs. Whatsit a charmingly daffy guide to the proceedings, introducing, in a song called “Wind,” the main theme: that one must be brave enough to “come outside” regardless of the literal or figurative weather. To the question of whether any individual can change the universe, she answers, “of course the answer is no but also … you will.”
The establishing numbers for the two boys are especially strong, as are their performers, both recent winners of the Jimmy Awards for high school musical singers. In “Uncertainty,” Calvin (Nicholas Barrón) proves his emotional intelligence in a kind of challenge match with Mrs. Who. And in the gorgeous “What Is a Father” for Charles Wallace (Mateo Lizcano) — “Is that like a mother with more keys?” — we get a foretaste of the extreme susceptibility to otherness that will eventually expose him to danger.
Christian’s score, abetted by a nine-person band under the direction of Ben Moss, is, like the boys, emotionally intelligent and susceptible to otherness. Threads of all kinds of music — the astonishing orchestrations are by a collective called StarFish — weave through Christian’s songs too quickly to be untangled; I’ve often detected Orff, Messiaen, Reich and New Orleans funk in the fabric. The warp is her steady attention to her own eccentric voice; there is never, as in most musicals, a hint of pastiche, not even of Sondheim.
Though that voice, and the often obscure if haunting lyrics, are not the root of the trouble here, they necessarily become cloying as they respond so sensitively to a story that enters an endless time wrinkle of its own. The repeated pattern of arrival, crisis and victory, followed by removal to another world where the same thing happens, soon grows laborious, grinding part of the first act and the entirety of the second into an undifferentiated powder. Even the wondrous visuals — in particular the costumes by Sarafina Bush and the faceless eight-foot-tall, purple-furred beasts made by the puppeteer James Ortiz — run into the wall of diminishing returns.
That’s a classic danger in novel-to-stage translations. Particularly with beloved works, adapters must hit all the major plot points or risk alienating their built-in audience. (The book, having sold more than 10 million copies, has a huge fan base; on opening night, the presence of two Supreme Court justices, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, seemed to offer the ultimate stamp of approval.) But hitting all the high points means neglecting the crucial valleys, and “A Wrinkle in Time” has a valley-sized hole in its middle.
That’s Meg, whom neither the director nor the writers have figured out how to characterize. It cannot be done as it is in the book, which is narrated as if from a seat on Meg’s shoulder, with full access to her brain and heart. Onstage, the point of view must be external, and distributed, which is why the secondary characters fare better than the main one. Not even Christian has found a way to establish Meg as the compelling center of the story’s emotions; when she finally gets a song big enough to achieve that, it’s too close to the end to make a difference, and, anyway, is staged in near darkness. (The lighting, by Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew, is beautiful but too often too dim.)
Of course, too much clarity can itself be a trap: It is “overrated in matters of great works of art,” Mrs. Who sings in “Uncertainty.” Fair enough, but if “A Wrinkle in Time” seeks the wider audiences it deserves, it will have to meet them partway. The problem it faces right now is not, as with Meg’s math, that it refuses to show its work. The problem is that, despite its obvious genius, it does little else.
A Wrinkle in Time
Through July 20 at Arena Stage, Washington, D.C.; arenastage.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes.
Jesse Green is the chief theater critic for The Times. He writes reviews of Broadway, Off Broadway, Off Off Broadway, regional and sometimes international productions.
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