A few days before Heather Christian was announced as one of the recipients of this year’s MacArthur “genius” grants, she wandered through the glass cube of the Rose Center for Earth and Space, expounding on supernovas, dark matter, and Oort clouds. With her bleached hair, elfin frame, and oversized sweatshirt, not to mention her ease with the niceties of the cosmos, she could have been mistaken for an Astronomy 101 teaching assistant, but in fact she is a forty-four-year-old composer, librettist, and performer, whose ineffable musical theatre (not musical-theatre) pieces have won her a cult following. Christian, who had been given a heads-up about the MacArthur Fellowship, said, “I always held hope in my heart that one day this would happen. But that ‘one day’ to me was, like, when I’m six

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