TESLA

TESLA

A New Musical & Elektrical Spectacle

Our Tesla Musical is inspired by the life of this remarkable technological visionary – this modern Prometheus who first changed the world by capturing the power of Niagara Falls with his Alternating Current system, making it possible to transmit electricity to all of America and the world with his generators and transmission lines.

Nikola Tesla is responsible for so many things we all take for granted, from the Alternating Current that powers everything electrical on the planet to the wireless transmission that makes possible radio, television, satellite and smartphone communication.

His story is an incredible one: a brilliant genius whose goal to harness the forces of nature for mankind pits him against the men-in-charge and a nascent military-industrial complex determined to protect the status quo.

Tesla brought us countless innovations between the 1880s and the 1930s. In addition to Alternating Current and wireless transmission, he was a pioneer in the development of remote control, x-rays, electromagnetism, robotics and the full panoply of electric motors used by industry and individuals around the world.

He was David against the Goliath of both the un-enlightened Capitalists that dominated the Gilded Age and the FBI and the military-industrial complex that aimed to thwart his futuristic, far-reaching and humanistic endeavors.

With his partner George Westinghouse he played a huge part in the now legendary War of the Currents: the battle for what was to be the form of electrical energy that would power the modern age – Alternating Current vs Direct Current ( AC vs DC ). This pitted him and Westinghouse against the financial titan JP Morgan and the famous inventor Thomas Edison. We illustrate this pivotal conflict in a powerfully unique combination of music, lyrics, and dialogue designed to entertain as well as inform.

The show’s music encompasses a wide variety of styles: ragtime, Vaudevillian lunatic show-biz, ethnic Serbian music, classic dramatic musical theatre, soaring ballads, ethereal pop, driving rock anthems and 21st-century electronic sounds.

We tell our story in an unusual way – employing non-linear narrative and heightened, supernatural forces; deploying special effects never before seen in the theatre; flowing from an intensely dramatic and highly theatrical book.

But all is focused on the truly human story of a man against time.