Civil War meets sci-fi in rock musical 'Futurity' - The Boston Globe

CAMBRIDGE - For all that it's called "Futurity,'' Brooklyn band the Lisps' new rock musical, which will have its world premiere Friday at Oberon, is a look back to the Civil War. Presented by the American Repertory Theater, it's a love story of sorts: Julian Munro meets Ada Lovelace and they find they have a lot in common. Julian is a Union soldier, a member of the Ohio 34th Infantry who, even as he's smashing Confederate railroad ties in Virginia, dreams of becoming an inventor. Ada is an English mathematician who's written about Charles Babbage's mechanical general-purpose computer. Ada might seem an unlikely figment of head Lisp César Alvarez's imagination, but in fact Lord Byron did have a daughter, Augusta Ada, who was a mathematician and who is sometimes considered the world's first computer programmer. What's not historical is Ada's meeting with Julian - partly because Julian is a figment of Alvarez's imagination, partly because Ada never visited America, and partly because she died in 1852, just 36 years old. But "Futurity'' is a science-fiction musical as well as a rock musical, so who's to say that Julian and Ada didn't hook up in a parallel universe?