CAST TRAVELS LIGHT-YEARS, SCORE FINDS A
NEW UNIVERSE, THE BOOK GETS LOST IN SPACE.
CAN THE WRINKLES IN THIS
NEW MUSICAL BE IRONED OUT?

Round about a lifetime ago, in the shadow of the Iron Curtain and the Cold War, Madeleine L’Engle wrote a fable for precocious children that she was pretty sure no one would want to publish. She was right. But before long, the novel that no one wanted to champion became a book everyone wanted to read: A Wrinkle in Time, a landmark in the lives of millions of young readers ever since, and a book that has influenced young-adult literature and speculative fiction like practically no other.

Inevitably it has been adapted to other media: at least three stage plays and two films, and now a production at Arena Stage in Washington, DC, that suggests that maybe it wanted to be musical theater all along, and just needs some further development to find its form. (It was author L’Engle’s granddaughter and literary executor, Charlotte Jones Voiklis, who promoted the idea of adapting the book for musical theater and is now a producer of this show, along with Aaron Glick and Plate Spinner Productions. These are Big Names that indicate high hopes for this outing.)

The Company

On its initial publication in 1962, A Wrinkle in Time read firstly as a sci-fi satire on the rise of new technologies empowered beyond human wisdom, and modern societies so determined to achieve perfection that they eradicate all that makes us humanly imperfect: something akin to both Frankenstein and 1984. The vehicle for these themes is a young girl’s embrace of adventure and desperate journey home, tossing a large helping of The Wizard of Oz into the mix. Dispensing with some of the moralizing and theological fantasies in L’Engle’s original, Lauren Yee’s serviceable book focuses on heroic adventures and homely, fraught relationships, which seek resolution through respect for one another’s flaws as well as strengths. Doing its best to dance about from suburban settings to distant planets, this sprawling plot doesn’t adapt easily to two and a half hours on the stage.

It is the music by Heather Christian, who is also the show’s lyricist, that makes Arena’s A Wrinkle in Time memorable, and sometimes glorious. Christian’s score is of the kind that exhausts one’s store of superlatives.

Amber Gray (Mrs Whatsit), Stacey Sargeant (Mrs Who), and Vicki Lewis (Mrs Which)

Nothing in young Meg Murry’s life has gone right since her father disappeared while investigating “tesseracts,” a means of transcending our four-dimensional world of space and time to travel instantaneously across the cosmos. Charles Wallace, her genius younger brother, gets the concept, but Meg feels she’s too contrary and impatient to learn anything or to be of much use to anyone—especially her mother, who seems to have some ideas about what it would take to find Mr. Murry and bring him back through interstellar space.

As is the way in such tales, Meg embarks on her destiny through supernatural intervention, in the person of a bizarre and benevolent tramp-like figure, Mrs. Whatsit, who appears in the midst of a tremendous rainstorm—soon followed by her counterparts, Mrs. Who and Mrs. Which, of varying degrees of antiquity and magical potency. They hold the secret of the tesseracts. Just as vital is the surprising entrance of Calvin O’Keefe, a casual school chum who is everything Meg is not: confident, assertive, charming, popular, but most of all compassionate and sympathetic—and unexpectedly eager to be of service.

The Company

With her unlikely cohort of warriors and mystical intercessors, Meg sets out on an odyssey that is, frankly, a bit hard to follow, as some or all transfer instantly from one extraterrestrial setting to another, according to rules that savor more of magic than of wormholes or relativity. (Though the novel pretty explicitly reveals that Meg’s three graces are angels, the musical averts this matter in theologically neutral silence.) Moving from scene to scene, we may be inclined to exclaim with that intrepid explorer of Oz, Dorothy Gale, “People come and go so quickly here!”

But two encounters make a forceful impression, thanks in part to the design collective dots (Santiago Orjuela-Laverde, Andrew Moerdyk, Kimie Nishikawa), Ani Taj’s choreography, and Sarafina Bush’s outstanding costumes—of the many ways that this Wrinkle is already a Broadway-caliber show, these designers deserve respect and recognition.

The Company

First there is Camazotz, the planet where everyone is so fulfilled they wallow in featureless misery. Here is the moral center of the show: Meg learns that getting what you think you want can bleed the joy out of life, and that aspiration is more meaningful than perfection. Unlike the grim, dreary dystopian fantasies we’re used to, Camazotz dazzles with light, order, and sweet reason—and it sucks. Somewhat counterintuitively, these are the brightest scenes in the play, and also among the most draining in their relentless uniformity. Second comes late in the show, a dazzling theatrical moment introduces the huge (really huge!) fuzzy creatures of a nameless planet, redirecting the journey in a new and unexpectedly moving way, thanks to James Ortiz’s brilliant puppet work and a truly sublime solo from Andrea Jones-Sojola as the comforting Aunt Beast.

Maybe it’s time to talk about time. Although the premise draws attention to the physics of space-time, that seems a mere device to bring adventurers from different realms together, and just as often to present them with obstacles convenient to the quest plot. What really matters are kinds of time more immediate to the drama. Real time on stage and in our rows of seats involves us in a kind of relativity that’s an inevitable part of our experience of theater and film: one 10-minute scene can go by too fast, another can seem to drag on for hours. A Wrinkle in Time seems to know it’s too long and is looking for places to cut; but in other scenes it leaves us asking for more.

Taylor Iman Jones (Meg) and Jon Patrick Walker (Mr. Murray)

Just as significant is that Wrinkle lines up with Dear Evan Hansen, Kimberly Akimbo, Mean Girls, The Outsiders, even Wicked, as a musical fixated on adolescence—its crises, its aspirations, its revelations, its call to authenticity (you can’t help wondering if at least a good deal of our popular theater is avoiding the complexities of adulthood). Again and again, the message is: Be Yourself. There’s No One Like You. Your Flaws Are Your Strengths. These are good messages for young people, and the original A Wrinkle in Time started rather than followed the trend, but as morals, they now have the flatness of motivational posters. Nothing in the dialogue or plot structure of Wrinkle either lends them special power or deepens them into something more complicated or lasting (L’Engle was hardly allergic to cliché; her celebrated novel opened with “It was a dark and stormy night”). I mean, if we summarized The Wizard of Oz as “There’s no place like home,” we’d miss out on a lot of artistry and wonder.

The wonder of Wrinkle isn’t in its slogans—it’s in the score. From the start, Heather Christian’s music announces that we’re far from the confines of traditional musical theater. Sure, other shows have incorporated exotic idioms—Pacific Overtures, The Band’s Visit—but Christian treats the whole earth and its aural traditions as one grand resource, which seems in keeping with a plot that carries its characters beyond our world. She aspires to a music of the spheres, marked by novel sonorities and gorgeous harmonies. You can certainly pick out echoes of Eastern modes and celebrated classical and theatrical choral landmarks: Carl Orff, Karol Szymanowski, the Bernstein of Candide, the Sondheim of Sunday in the Park with George. She and the collective known as StarFish create other-worldly orchestrations that shimmer and churn, brought to life by Music Director Ben Moss‘s terrific ensemble. But imagine a chorus of truly staggering intensity sustained, revisited, and reverberating in one evening’s entertainment, and you can see why all the euphonious intensity can be a bit much—as well as why anyone charged with reshaping this show will struggle over what can be cut.

Nicholas Barrón as Calvin

One of the score’s most striking features is its use of the phenomenally sustained note—held, layered, and delivered with thrilling intensity. Several cast members accomplish this trick in solos, giving the audience a direct experience of temporal elasticity. In those moments, Wrinkle doesn’t just talk about the fabric of time—it lets you feel it being pulled. A score that uses virtuosity not just to impress, but to embody an idea physically and emotionally, is rare. We may not find suspense in the plot of the play, but we can’t help feeling it in those transcendently held notes, which seem to suspend time through our direct experience.

A seasoned interpreter of Christian’s work—she staged the composer’s Obie-winning Oratorio for Living Things—Lee Sunday Evans directs with a precision that never betrays her deep feeling for the characters. This bold new adaptation of a classic text is very fortunate in finding an extraordinary cast: veterans Amber Gray, Stacy Sargeant, and Vicki Lewis as the Mrs. Whatsit, Who and Which; Jon Patrick Walker and Andrea Jones-Sojola as Mr. and Mrs. Murry; and especially the young performers who play the brave though often terrified crew that is whisked off to cross the universe and set things right. As Meg, Taylor Iman Jones carries much of the production on her shoulders in a role that demands sharp emotional nuance. Mateo Lizcano, already a Broadway presence but still a college junior, accomplishes the difficult task of undergoing fundamental transformation, singing as well as acting the duality of Charles Wallace. Nicholas Barrón is uniquely sincere, genuine, and convincing playing Calvin’s wholesome adolescent awkwardness. He’d be perfect filling in for Darren Criss in Maybe Happy Ending—though he’s already headed to the Lincoln Center Theater production of Ragtime.

Mateo Lizcano as Charles Wallace

Whatever becomes of A Wrinkle in Time—and it’s clearly a work still in development—these gifted young performers represent the future of musical theater, and the score marks it as something more than a bold experiment; it’s a shot across the bow from a new kind of musical theater: one that dares to imagine worlds beyond its own borders, and sounds them out in music so strange and beautiful, it just might bend time around you.

Taylor Iman Jones as Meg

production photos by DJ Corey
promo photos by Tony Powell

A Wrinkle in Time
Arena Stage
Mead Center for American Theater, 1101 6th St SW, Washington, DC
2 hours 40 minutes with a 15-minute intermission
ends on July 20, 2025
for tickets ($59-$209), call 202.488.3300 or visit Arena Stage

for more shows, visit Theatre in DC

Bernard Welt’s essays on film, television and other popular arts for Art issues journal are collected in Mythomania: Fantasies, Fables, and Sheer Lies in Contemporary American Popular Art. He has taught, written, and lectured on cinema, theater, the arts, and especially dream studies.