Wait a minute. That sentence does not compute. The words “Tom Stoppard” and “sentimental” in intimate proximity? Mr. Stoppard is the intellectual magician who turns academic pursuits like philology, etymology and ontology into quicksilver theater. People don’t cry at his plays; they ponder. Yet anyone who looked hard enough could always see the fragile, hopeful heart beneath the cerebral glitter in Mr.

Stoppard’s work during the past 40 years, from “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” (1967) to “The Coast of Utopia” (produced on Broadway last year). Now, for theatergoers who find looking hard to be a strain, there is “Rock ’n’ Roll,” which opened last night at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater under the direction of Trevor Nunn . This is a play in which the heart of the matter is the human heart. Mr.

Stoppard might prefer to say that his passionately acted, decades-spanning tale of love, revolution and loud music, set in Prague and Cambridge, England, is about the mind. But that’s mind as distinct from brain, a crucial difference in “Rock ’n’ Roll.” The brain is merely an organism, trapped in a decaying body.

The mind is unconfined and, as embodied by a host of insistently individual characters, it roams through phenomena as different as the poetry of Sappho and the songs of Pink Floyd. This being a work by Mr. Stoppard, the mind expresses itself in many, often polysyllabic words. But its presence is perhaps most purely felt in the electrically amplified songs that throb throughout the show. Writing about the political and cultural legacy of the late 1960s in his own late 60s (Mr.