Okay, so here’s what I’m watching right now, and it’s not a limited series. While the streaming world is publicly having its worst run in years for prestige conversation — and I mean their own critics are saying the Zeitgeist has gone somewhere else — I am over here looking at the Broadway production calendar for the next eighteen months and I am BARELY holding it together.

Let me be specific about why.

The industry conversation right now is about adaptation. Every platform, every studio, every network is doing IP. They are adapting comics, podcasts, shows that were adapted from books that were adapted from earlier shows. And the consistent note coming back from audiences and critics alike is that the emotion never seems to drive the decisions — things just happen. The spectacle is there. The feeling isn’t.

Broadway has not been immune to this. The jukebox musical, the franchise extension, the movie-to-stage pipeline — all of it can go sideways when nobody asks what the show is actually about before they call the LED vendor.

But here is what I am seeing that is different right now: a class of new productions coming up the pipeline where the spectacle is the argument.

I got eyes on the pre-production for Latitude Zero, the new original musical from book writer Simone Adeyemi and composer-lyricist Tomás Reyes, directed by Marcus Osei-Bonsu at the Aldridge Theatre. The production design documents I’ve seen — and the early rehearsal footage that made my entire body lock up in the best way — tell me that choreographer Bernadette Fong is doing something I have not seen in years.

She is building the dance vocabulary from isolation upward. The ensemble starts the show moving in units of two and three — tiny clusters, staggered rhythms, nothing synchronized. Then across the runtime those clusters compound. By the second act finale, forty-two dancers are moving in full unison in a formation sequence that shifts direction every eight counts, and the shift is always against what your eye expects. Fong described it in an interview as “learning to agree in public,” and I watched the rough tape of that sequence three times because the geometry is IMMACULATE. I know the word “precise” gets thrown around. This is what precise looks like when it also has a point of view.

The scenic design by Nneka Oduya is built around a rotating central platform that descends through three planes — street level, underground, some abstracted void between. And the lighting rig by Dmitri Aleksandrov uses narrow-beam followspots at a scale I haven’t seen deployed this way before. Tight, tight beams. Almost like the light has opinions about who deserves to be seen right now. That is a design choice with a thesis, and I am here for every single lux of it.

Now — and I say this because earned honesty is the whole deal — the book is still a risk. Adeyemi’s first two shows were chamber-scale, and structural choices that work in a 300-seat house have historically needed full reinvention at Broadway size. If the second act book scenes can carry the weight between Fong’s movement sequences, this production will be a genuine event. If they can’t, it will be a spectacular spectacle with a hole in the middle. I do not know which version we’re getting yet. I am watching closely.

What I know for certain is that this creative team is making something that knows what it is about. That is more than I can say for most adaptations in any medium this year. And the diva situation — I have heard things about the leading performance by Zaria Combest that I am not printing yet, because I want the full opening night review to say what it needs to say. But Combest was a principal dancer before she was a singer, Bernadette Fong has clearly written her a part that uses everything she walked into that rehearsal room with, and the early word I’m getting is THERE. Just: there.

While the rest of the entertainment industry is out here betting on IP and getting genuinely puzzled about why audiences aren’t emotionally lit up, theater is doing the thing it does at its absolute best — building a room and filling it with a promise. The best spectacle keeps that promise.

Go find out who’s keeping theirs. Previews start in October. Buy your ticket now.