Summary
Blending classical choral traditions with blues, gospel, and jazz, this immersive concert-style piece by Heather Christian functions as a modern meditation on time. The work is structured into three movements that explore existence on the quantum, human, and cosmic scales, weaving together scientific concepts and personal memories. Performed by a large ensemble of singers and musicians who often surround the audience, the piece examines the collision of individual lives with the vastness of the universe.
Wednesday, November 12, 2025 at 2:00 PM Nov 12, 2025, 2:00 PM
I think this is one of this year’s ~essential off-Broadway shows to see the space & hear the sound & appreciate the technical feat. I also didn’t really connect with it. The tiny round stage with steep-raked seating brings the whole audience into the show even before they explicitly invite your participation. Chaotic, genre-spanning music fills the room: the music of life, of being alive, of being human, of being anything at all. Everywhere around you - voices, instruments, lights, & stories weaving in and out of time, cosmology, & biology into this moment in this space - the effect is disorienting, even when they stick to English and don’t dip into Latin. A great popcorn ball of light is slowly but jerkily hoisted towards the ceiling. As impressive as the whole affair is, I couldn’t help but feel that I’d stepped into a late-season episode of Lena Dunham’s “Girls,” privy to a vanity project that claims to reach for the whole of human experience but has very little connection to it at all. I’m pretty sure Heather Christian just wanted to write an oratorio, which is cool but takes some of the oomph out of the messaging. She impels us to turn the page on our history of violence, and, frankly, it sounds like a perfunctory effort to justify the formal exercise. Change starts with 300 New Yorkers paying $181 to stare at each other for an hour and a half at a Wednesday matinee. The performers make a lot of eye contact with you and the music is very pretty.