Musical Today
Cut-paper illustration: the concentric rings of an orrery around one small brass sphere.

Galileo

What Galileo actually is

The production's own line is that Galileo is about a man who confronted those in power for corruptly suppressing the truth. That is a description of a seventeenth-century trial and, plainly, of something else as well; a musical that picks this subject in this decade has made a choice about what it is for.

Danny Strong wrote the book; Zoe Sarnak and Michael Weiner wrote the score. Michael Mayer directs and David Neumann choreographs. Raúl Esparza, a four-time Tony nominee, plays Galileo, with Jeremy Kushnier and Joy Woods among the cast; Barberini, the confidant who becomes the Pope who tries him, is the second role the story turns on.

It is a first Broadway production, not a revival or a transfer, which is the rarer of the two kinds of new musical: nothing about it has been tested on a paying Broadway audience before 10 November.