Tom Stoppard's thrilling 'Arcadia'

Be not afraid of the chatter about geometry, the squabbling about Newtonian physics and English landscape architecture, about chaos theory and obscure romantic poets and, yes, something called iterated algorithms.

"Arcadia," back on Broadway for the first time since 1995, is a heady, aching thrill of a tragicomedy. Part historical-literary mystery, part academic satire, Tom Stoppard's time-traveling masterwork is, above all else, a ravishing romance -- a great love story, really -- between the worlds of the mind and the heart.

See it when you're not tired, and try to sit close. The production's acoustics are not brilliant. Stoppard is.

And there is so much to overhear in the garden room of this English country estate, where foolish and beautiful people from 1809 and today alternate scenes that explore how we know what we know and how imperfectly we can ever know it.

Director David Leveaux's celebrated English revival, mostly recast for the Broadway import, is visually lean and emotionally exuberant.

We begin in 1809, with a 13-year-old genius, Thomasina (the charming but hardest to understand Bel Powley) and her young tutor Septimus (the dashing, if not quite vulnerable enough, Tom Riley). They study science in the midst of the transition from orderly classicism to unruly romanticism -- shown through the change in English landscape styles.

Two centuries later enters a historian -- played with wondrous, insufferable self-dramatics by Billy Crudup (who played Septimus in 1995). Researching a hunch that the young Lord Byron had shot a little-known poet there, he barges in on the family and a fiction writer (the exquisitely rigorous Lia Williams), who's using the garden for her book about romanticism as the "decline from thinking to feeling."

Raúl Esparza is deeply comfortable and melancholy as the mathematician trying to understand prescient messages left in Thomasina's school notes. Thomasina grieves for the loss of so many Athenian plays, which she blames on that "noodle," Cleopatra. A definition of progress -- and all it cannot do -- resonates with a deep yearning for an unattainable order.

For all the playful showing-off and brainy name-dropping, "Arcadia" spills over with the ecstasy of discovery and the painful joy in learning that "people fancying people" -- random heat -- is the attraction Newton overlooked. The last thing Stoppard's dazzling words need is an audibility problem. Otherwise, gorgeous.