Galileo Galilei, one of the late Renaissance’s most recognizable rebels, is headed to Broadway in a musical that gives his clash with the Roman Catholic Church a roaring rock and roll pulse. The production connects his radical ideas with the Scientific Revolution.

“Galileo,” starring Raúl Esparza and Joy Woods, follows the astronomer as his work on the heliocentric model collides with the prevailing belief that Earth occupied the center of the cosmos. Preview performances begin November 10 at New York City’s Shubert Theatre, with the opening set for December 6.

Director Michael Mayer has worked on the production for nearly a decade. He saw the makings of a modern rock star in Galileo, who was born in Italy in 1564 and has been described by historians as defiant, arrogant and subversive.

“I said, ‘I think this should be a rock musical,’” Mayer said. “He literally rocked our world.”

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, a coproducer of the musical, describes Galileo more bluntly as “a bit of an a**hole.” Tyson is also director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Tyson said Galileo’s egotism, perhaps more than his research alone, contributed to his fall from favor with church authorities. His writings were banned for more than 200 years, and he was confined to house arrest in Tuscany.

“Had he been more politic about it,” Tyson said, “he might not have met the fate that he did.” Galileo died in confinement in 1642, but his ideas continued to spread.

Two centuries after his death, the Catholic Church lifted its ban on Galileo’s works as evidence made clear that the combative astronomer had been correct. Tyson, Mayer and Esparza hope the Broadway production will feel especially relevant in the current political climate.

“It is a man who is standing up for what is objectively true against dogmatic forces that would suppress those truths,” Tyson said. “This is something that we need in these times.”

Galileo worked from his home in Padua in northern Italy while the Catholic Church increasingly focused on enforcing orthodoxy. He became one of the most skilled users of the newly invented telescope and, based on observations with a homemade instrument, suggested in 1610 that Jupiter had moons.

His observations of light moving across Venus’ surface strengthened his belief in the ideas of Renaissance astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus. Copernicus had proposed in the early 1500s that Earth and the other planets revolve around the sun.

Galileo’s findings attracted the attention of Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, sometimes known as the “Hammer of Heretics.” Bellarmine told Galileo that the heliocentric model contradicted scripture and ordered him to abandon the subject.

Bellarmine does not appear in the Broadway production, which instead features several fictionalized church leaders. The musical also takes creative liberties with Galileo’s daughter Virginia, played by Woods as a gifted scientist who participates actively in her father’s research.

The real Virginia was living in a convent by age 13, where she developed expertise as an apothecary. Even with such changes, the production draws heavily from actual events, including Galileo’s experiments questioning almost 2,000 years of accepted thinking about motion.

Using an incline plane, Galileo demonstrated that falling objects accelerate. After his first confrontation with the Roman Inquisition prevented him from spreading Copernican theory, he found a powerful ally in Pope Urban VIII, portrayed in the musical by Jeremy Kushnier.

Believing he had the pope’s backing, Galileo published “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems.” He wrote in Italian rather than Latin, allowing his ideas to reach a broader public.

The work presented arguments for and against a model centered on the sun. Yet Galileo again provoked the church by creating Simplicio, a character who repeated talking points used by the pope, causing his relationship with Urban VIII to rupture abruptly.

“He cannot help himself,” Esparza said. “I think he thinks he’s smarter than everybody in the room.”

Galileo faced the Roman Inquisition in 1633 and was accused of heresy, a charge that had resulted in others being burned alive. He ultimately renounced his positions on heliocentrism.

Esparza is returning to Broadway after 14 years. The production enlisted Ethan Tobman, creative director for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, to design effects that turn the Shubert Theatre into an immersive digital starfield resembling a planetarium.

“It’s almost vertigo-inducing, and I love that because if you’re doing a show about technology, you want the audience to experience something they’ve never seen before,” Esparza said.

Broadway remains a notoriously fickle business, where finding the right combination of subject and musical style can be daunting. Mayer and Tyson nevertheless see powerful material in Galileo’s curiosity, sacrifice and compromise, along with one of science history’s most famous stories.