Carrie Greenlea reviews live opera performances, skewering unsuspecting singers for everything from bad high notes to bad nose jobs. Her husband, Norman, reviews recordings, and, having failed at a singing career himself, prefers to equivocate rather than hurt anyone’s feelings. The cracks in their marriage and in their respective approaches to criticism are broken wide open when Stefano Donato, a mediocre Italian tenor whose career they have jointly ruined, moves in with them and proceeds to exact revenge!

Garbo and Me traces Greta Garbo’s dramatic journey from Swedish schoolgirl to Hollywood legend to New York recluse. Her cool Scandinavian beauty was limned with a smoldering sexuality that enthralled audiences and defied censors. But behind Garbo’s glamorous screen persona was insecure Greta, yearning for the snows of her homeland. As she conquers the studio system, successfully transitions to talking pictures, and juggles a string of lovers, both male and female, Garbo struggles to protect her cherished privacy. After a disastrous foray into comedy, and weary of the constant intrusions of fans and the press, Garbo assumes a new name and slips into anonymity on the streets of Manhattan.

Trapped in an unhappy marriage and a job far beneath his intellectual capabilities, the young Einstein escapes into his dreams, lured by the siren call of a beautiful, elusive woman named Josette. In every dream, he gradually discovers, time works differently (i.e. backwards, standing still), so that just as in life, there are unpredictable obstacles to his romantic relationships. Gradually, Einstein’s dreams begin to seem more real to him than his life. It is not until he finally dreams a time world where he and Josette can be together, that he simultaneously discovers the nature of time and the meaning of love. When he awakens, he is able to distill everything he learned in his dreams into a new theory of time and space—the Special Theory of Relativity. As a result, the world will never be the same.

In 1637, an amateur French mathematician named Pierre de Fermat jotted down a seemingly simple theorem in the margin of a textbook. He followed it with a tantalizing note: “I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this margin is not large enough to contain.” But Fermat never wrote down his proof, and for centuries, mathematicians were stymied searching for it. In June, 1993, Princeton professor Andrew Wiles combined several branches of advanced mathematics—which Fermat could not possibly have known—in order to come up with a solution. After achieving world fame overnight for his discovery, Wiles learned from a colleague vetting his proof that there was a flaw in it, a gap in the logic that could not be bridged. Now the race was really on—Wiles had to fix his proof before anyone else beat him to it, and, worse, do so with the whole world watching! Fermat’s Last Tango is a fictional, whimsical musical, inspired by this story. Combining musical styles ranging from operetta to blues to the tango of the title, Fermat’s Last Tango portrays, in a slightly irreverent fashion, the excitement that intellectual achievement can generate.