After long wanderings, the disgraced, blind, outcast Œdipus arrives at the sacred grove where Apollo has prophesied that he will die. Off Œdipus goes into the grove, never to be seen again. And somehow, this closing of a cycle bestows blessings on the community that forced him out. With the musical The Gospel at Colonus, first presented in 1983 during the glory years of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival, the experimentalist Lee Breuer and the composer Bob Telson—both white—transposed mystic Sophoclean tragedy into an ecstatic Black Pentecostal key. Suffice it to say that the theater world was knocked sideways. The script was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. Productions on Broadway, Harlem’s Apollo Theater, and all across America followed. Perhaps luckily, though, The Gospel at Colonus has never quite become a cliché, washed out by overexposure. So much the better for the prospects of this summer’s revival on Little Island, with the charismatic Davóne Tines prominent in the cast. —Matthew Gurewitsch