L’Engle, Madeleine

Despite a gorgeous score and some fine performances, the musical adaptation of the Madeleine L’Engle classic gets trapped in a time loop.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.From left, Amber Gray (Mrs. Whatsit), Stacey Sargeant (Mrs. Who) and Vicki Lewis (Mrs. Which).DJ CoreyThere 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.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More