A musical celebrating the first three women Supreme Court justices is bound to involve a lot of persistence in the face of adversity, and Tuesday’s opening night of “Justice: A New Musical” at Marin Theatre Company involved more of that than anticipated.

On a windy night, the show was delayed by power outages, once during the preshow speech and once late in the opening number.

But everyone persevered, passing the time while everything booted up again with discussions with company leadership and with the musical’s creators, MTC’s recent playwright in residence Lauren Gunderson and the longtime songwriting team of composer Bree Lowdermilk and lyricist Kait Kerrigan.

By the time the show started up where it left off, everyone in the house was even more invested than usual in seeing the show succeed.

Named by American Theatre magazine as the most produced playwright in the United States other than Shakespeare for several years (tied with Lynn Nottage this season), Gunderson has had several plays at MTC in the past, including “I and You” and “The Catastrophist,” as well as all three of her and Margot Melcon’s “Christmas at Pemberley” trilogy of “Pride and Prejudice” sequels.

Kerrigan and Lowdermilk previously collaborated with Gunderson on the musical “Rosie Revere, Engineer & Friends,” and Gunderson and Lowdermilk cowrote “The Amazing Adventures of Dr. Wonderful and Her Dog” for the Kennedy Center. Kerrigan’s play “Father/Daughter” also recently played Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre Company.

“Justice” premiered last April at Arizona Theatre Company (whose artistic director, Sean Daniels, used to be California Shakespeare Theater’s associate artistic director), but in a different incarnation. Instead of Sonia Sotomayor, the third character was a fictional African American woman going through confirmation hearings as a Supreme Court nominee. MTC’s production is billed as a “continued world premiere.”

Played with passion and a powerful voice by Stephanie Prentice, Sotomayor functions at first as a narrator of sorts. The story picks up in 1993, when Ruth Bader Ginsburg joins the Supreme Court and Sandra Day O’Connor greets her as a welcome new colleague. Lynda DiVito exudes appropriately lively intelligence as Ginsburg, and Karen Murphy displays gracious dignity with a touch of wry amusement as O’Connor.

The musical is by no means a play-by-play of the justices’ lives and careers, nor is it particularly rooted in any particular time. In 90 minutes without intermission, it whisks through O’Connor and Ginsburg’s time together on the Supreme Court, then Ginsburg and Sotomayor’s, pausing here and there to capture a particular salient moment of historical importance.

Only a few of their colleagues on the Supreme Court are mentioned. Even among the subsequent women justices, there’s an unnamed reference to Amy Coney Barrett and a shout-out to Ketanji Brown Jackson, but there’s no mention of Elena Kagan unless I missed it.

It’s all reverent, and mostly staid, almost ceremonial. Kerrigan and Lowdermilk’s songs tend toward stately anthems and pensive ballads, the liveliest among them being Ginsburg’s cabaret number about being “notorious,” delivered with gusto by DiVito.

It’s not a song-and-dance musical so much as a stand-around-and-sing one, but director Ashley Rodbro keeps things moving, repositioning the performers around Carlos Aceves’ gray two-story set, ringed by classical columns.

Certainly, the characters themselves experience some drama along the way. They suffer terrible loss, and comfort each other as best they can. But all that is handled with stoic dignity, and perhaps a song. Despite the occasional mention of lively disagreements, the only hint of any friction among the justices is liberal Ginsburg silently fuming at Republican O’Connor over her deciding vote in Bush v. Gore.

In part that goes back to the reverence that pervades the piece, but ultimately the musical feels less about the justices as people than about the whole idea of social progress. That’s also why the latter part of the show is so bittersweet, as a sharp rightward turn in Supreme Court has started unraveling as much of that progress as possible at a feverish pace.

It’s a show designed more than anything to inspire a new generation to continue the fight, especially when the odds seem stacked against them. That message is hammered home repeatedly in pithy aphorisms and in song, and right now it’s one that a lot of people sorely need to hear.

Sam Hurwitt is a Bay Area arts journalist and playwright. Contact him at shurwitt@gmail.com or on Twitter at twitter.com/shurwitt.