Brian Greene grasps a beam of light. He freezes in an electrified rock-star pose, and as a live orchestra begins to hum, the beam of light slips through his fingertips and flashes across the stage.

It’s opening night at the eighth annual World Science Festival in New York City, and Dr. Greene is explaining — no, telling the story behind — Einstein’s theory of relativity to a sold-out audience. To Dr. Greene, a Columbia string theorist who is a founder of the festival, these concepts are certainly the stuff of numbers and equations. But onstage, in the Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College in Manhattan, Einstein’s speed-of-light calculations are cloaked in music and drama, told by live actors and carefully choreographed to digital animations projected onto a screen.

Since the World Science Festival began in 2008, Dr. Greene and his team of artists and educators have discovered (in part through considerable ticket sales) that people who might never attend a half-hour lecture will soak up 90 minutes of science, provided it is presented as top-notch theater.

“We needed to have a science festival in New York — a big, vibrant metropolis that celebrates fashion and food and theater and music, but doesn’t celebrate science,” Dr. Greene said in an interview, describing the impetus for all of this. “That was the project we were going to pull off.”