Sinéad O’Connor was the flipside of Generation X. Her credo was not “whatever” but “do or die.” Even as a young woman, she was fine with her meteoric career crashing after she tore up a photo of the Pope on late-night TV, because only good girls achieved pop stardom, she said. Likewise, Sonya Tayeh might have taken the Broadway route in her treatment of the singer. After all, when Tayeh won a Tony in 2020 for Moulin Rouge! The Musical, it came after years of serving Broadway (not to mention such good girls as Miley Cyrus). The 49-year-old director-choreographer might have made a jukebox musical, a bio-dancical with an O’Connor imitator at the helm. Instead, she built this Joyce Theater co-production (which won rave reviews at its world premiere, in the U.K.) around us, her devotees and witnesses. The cast’s 10 women—mostly modern dancers, aged 40 and older—are our stand-ins, being both themselves and absorbed by the singer whose solitary, luminous voice moves through them. As Tayeh notes, “I wanted The Surge to be carried by women whose lives and experiences could not be separated from the work itself.” —Apollinaire Scherr