Galileo

Galileo follows a man who looks through a new instrument, writes down what he sees, and discovers that the answer is not permitted. The musical takes the argument between a stubborn astronomer and the institution that had already ruled on the matter, and sets it to rock music.

He is not a martyr by temperament. He is vain, funny, fond of an argument and convinced he can win by being obviously right, which is precisely the miscalculation. A friend rises through the church hierarchy and becomes the man who has to decide what to do about him. His daughter, in a convent, watches the collision approach. The trial, when it arrives, turns out to be about obedience rather than astronomy.

The book is by Danny Strong, with music and lyrics by Michael Weiner and Zoe Sarnak. It premiered in 2024 and won six Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle awards, including best production and best original music. The score is unapologetically anachronistic: power ballads set against seventeenth-century robes.

That collision of sound and setting is the argument rather than an accident. The show is insisting that a fight over who is permitted to say what is true is not a historical curiosity, and it is far more interested in the human cost of being right than in the science itself.

It suits audiences who like their history staged with energy rather than reverence, and anyone drawn to stories about institutions closing ranks around a decision they have already made. Live, the score has the drive and volume of a concert, attached to a story with something at stake.