David Henry Hwang Is Writing a Musical Based on Higgs Boson Doc Particle Fever
The project features songs by Bear McCreary and Zoe Sarnak.
David Henry Hwang
Tricia Baron
David Henry Hwang is at work on a musicalization of the 2013 documentary Particle Fever. News of the project was reported in The New York Times August 5 and confirmed by press representatives August 6.
Hwang is penning the book (based on the film by Mark Levinson and David Kaplan), and developed the story with the project’s songwriters, Bear McCreary and Zoe Sarnack (McCreary actually spilled the beans in July at San Diego ComicCon). Leigh Silverman is directing.
The documentary tracks the inaugural experiments of Switzerland’s Large Hadron Collider and the search for confirmation of the Higgs boson, the so-called “god particle” vital to understanding the creation of our universe (spoiler alert: the scientists achieved exactly that).
“Theatre artists, like scientists, are called to probe the biggest, most confounding questions in the universe,” say producers Megan Kingery and Annie Roney in a joint statement. “How lucky we are to have such a stellar team of fellow explorers to collaborate with on Particle Fever. As anyone who has followed their careers would expect, David Henry Hwang, Bear McCreary, Zoe Sarnak, and Leigh Silverman are creating something brilliantly authentic with this work. Even more impressive—they’ve uncovered the inherent hilarity and joy that lie at the heart of human ambition, making this journey every bit as entertaining as it is enlightening.”
The project is still in very early stages, though a private in-development reading of the material was given in NYC in June. A production timeline has not yet been established.