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    8 New Shows Our Theater Critics Are Talking About

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    A British satirical comedy, a Tennessee Williams classic, a soundscape of Havana: These are productions worth knowing about.Critic’s PickAndrew Scott, Andrew Scott, Andrew Scott …‘Vanya’Directed by Sam Yates and adapted by Simon Stephens, this one-man “Vanya” — in which Andrew Scott delivers a tour-de-force performance — arrives Off Broadway after a run in London, where it won an Olivier for best play revival. Though faithful to the original material, the production offers not just modern touches, but also “a new way of seeing into the heart of its beauty,” our critic wrote.From Jesse Green’s review:What makes the production exemplary, like the play itself, is the emotion. I hate to think why Scott is such a sadness machine, but the tears (and blushes and glows and sneers) lie very shallow under his skin. He only rarely raises his voice. As the feelings are evidently coming directly and carefully from his heart, he narrowcasts them directly and carefully at yours.Through May 11 at the Lucille Lortel Theater. Read the full review.Critic’s PickThe lush sounds of Havana.“Buena Vista Social Club” at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater features choreography by Patricia Delgado and Justin Peck.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times‘Buena Vista Social Club’The joyous horns and full-bodied voices that make up the beloved 1997 album come alive in this Broadway musical, with a book by Marco Ramirez, direction by Saheem Ali and choreography by Patricia Delgado and Justin Peck. Though the show offers a fictional back story for these veteran Cuban musicians who shot to global fame after recording the album, the thrill here is the music, exuberant and expansive, which fills in the beats of Cuba’s history, both in sorrow and in revelry.From Elisabeth Vincentelli’s review:The spirit of the musical “Buena Vista Social Club” is evident in its opening scene. … The music is center stage, and we immediately understand its power as a communal experience that binds people. Therein lies the production’s greatest achievement. For a place where music so often plays a crucial role, Broadway hardly ever highlights the thrill of music making itself.At the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater. Read the full review.A ferocious Paul Mescal in a Tennessee Williams classic.Downhill with no brakes: Patsy Ferran as Blanche and Paul Mescal as Stanley in “A Streetcar Named Desire” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times‘A Streetcar Named Desire’Paul Mescal and Patsy Ferran dance with violence and desire as Stanley and Blanche in Rebecca Frecknall’s gritty revival of Tennessee Williams’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. In the absence of beauty, brutality pervades in Frecknall’s darker production, which features a utilitarian set and exhilarating performances that ratchet up the fury. From Jesse Green’s review:Mescal is best known and deservedly praised for excruciatingly sensitive portrayals of hurting hunks who can barely acknowledge their pain. (I can’t speak for “Gladiator II,” but he is superb in “Normal People,” “Aftersun” and “All of Us Strangers.”) It was therefore not immediately evident that he could do justice to a character, first played by Marlon Brando, that Arthur Miller described as a “sexual terrorist.” I am sorry to report that he can.Through April 6 at the Harvey Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music. Read the full review.Critic’s PickThe vicious nature of the truth.Andrew Barth Feldman (on the floor) with Joanna Gleason in “We Had a World.”Jeremy Daniel We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Operation Mincemeat’ Review: The Stiff Who Saved Europe

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      A proudly silly British musical comedy about the “Trojan corpse” of World War II comes to Broadway.In 1943, in wartime England, a homeless person dies in the street after ingesting rat poison. Given a fake postmortem identity by British counterintelligence officers — no effort to find his family is made — he is dressed in a military uniform, sealed in a cooler, then ejected from a submarine near the coast of Spain. The papers planted on his corpse eventually make their way to Hitler, convincing him that the Allies will begin their invasion of Europe in Sardinia, when in fact they plan to do so in Sicily. As a result, Axis troops are diverted to the wrong Italian island.In short, Operation Mincemeat, as this real World War II operation was called, works.But is it funny?Whether “Operation Mincemeat,” the diverting if irksome musical comedy about the plan, works as well will depend a lot on your answer to that question. A hit in London, it has come to Broadway, where it opened on Thursday at the Golden Theater, having paid close attention to differences in accent, dialect and usage between British and American audiences. (Public school there is private school here.) But neither the authors, a collective called SpitLip, nor the director, Robert Hastie, appear to have given sufficient thought to our different senses of humor.Theirs you will recognize. It combines Oxbridge snootiness with panto ribaldry to create a self-canceling middlebrow snark. You may detect in the show’s DNA elements of Monty Python, Benny Hill, “The Play That Goes Wrong” and the Hitchcock stage spoof “The 39 Steps.” But if those influences have made you laugh, even as much as they have made me, you may still experience diminishing returns in the nonstop tickling of “Operation Mincemeat.” The Pythons kept their satire sharp and their sketches quick.Not so here. At more than two-and-a-half hours, the show is hardly svelte. Nor, with its aim so scattershot, is it clear what it is satirizing.At first it seems to want to mock the public school toffs and blustery brass who populate MI5, the agency that developed the plan. They are offered as idiots, freaks and over-entitled snobs. In the show’s first song, “Born to Lead,” Ewen Montagu (Natasha Hodgson) explains that “fortune favors bravery and a fortune’s what I’ve got.” His colleague Charles Cholmondeley (David Cumming) is a nervous Nellie and an amateur entomologist with bugged-out eyes behind big round glasses that make him look like a cartoon click beetle. The predominant trait of their colonel, Johnny Bevan (Zoë Roberts), is that he despises figurative language.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Musical Comedy ‘Operation Mincemeat’ to Open on Broadway Next Spring

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      The show is about a real World War II episode in which British intelligence planted disinformation on a dead body to fool the Germans.“Operation Mincemeat,” an improbably successful British musical comedy, already has a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction quality to it: It’s about a World War II military ruse in which British intelligence planted fake information on a dead body to (successfully) mislead the Germans.Now the producers of “Operation Mincemeat” are hoping for another hard-to-believe turn of events: Finding success on Broadway at a time when many other shows have big stars or big brands.The oddball show began its life in a tiny London theater and then this year won the Olivier Award — Britain’s equivalent to the Tonys — for best new musical. On Tuesday, the show’s producers announced that the musical’s first production outside Britain will open on Broadway next spring, with previews beginning on Feb. 15 and an opening slated for March 20 at the John Golden Theater.A lead producer, Jon Thoday, said in an interview that he was concerned about opening in a climate dominated by celebrities, but also inspired by the success of plays like “Stereophonic” and “Oh, Mary!” that demonstrate it is still possible for unknown shows with little-known casts to break through.“It’s daunting, because you come here and you look at one show after another with a giant Hollywood star in it, and we’re doing a show with people who had never written a musical before,” said Thoday, whose company, Avalon, is producing the show. “We’re going to see whether it works here or not. We’re hoping it will, obviously, otherwise we wouldn’t be doing it.”“Operation Mincemeat” is set in 1943 and based on a true story that is seemingly so crazy it has repeatedly been adapted and written about. The musical was written and composed by a comedy group called SpitLip — David Cumming, Felix Hagan, Natasha Hodgson and Zoë Roberts — which bills itself as “makers of big, dumb musicals.” Their show, directed by Robert Hastie, had several small productions around London before arriving on the West End in early 2023.Powered by heart and humor, the show has had strong word-of-mouth — it has a passionate group of fans and repeat attenders who are affectionately known as mincefluencers — and has become profitable in the West End, where it continues to run. Thoday said he hopes that the original cast will come to New York, but that that depends on whether they are able to get visas.Thoday said he expected that the show would be capitalized for about $11.5 million.“Operation Mincemeat” is not the only show to announce Broadway plans this week. On Monday, the producers of a musical adaptation of the book “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” said their show would come to Broadway at an unspecified point next year. More

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      ‘Sunset Boulevard,’ Heading to Broadway, Wins Big at Olivier Awards

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      The musical, which stars Nicole Scherzinger, won seven awards at Britain’s version of the Tonys. And Sarah Snook won best actress for “The Picture of Dorian Gray.”A reimagining of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Sunset Boulevard,” starring Nicole Scherzinger as Norma Desmond, the long forgotten silent movie star who descends into madness, was the big winner at this year’s Olivier Awards, Britain’s equivalent of the Tonys.The musical, which will open at the St. James Theater on Broadway this fall, was honored Sunday during a ceremony at the Royal Albert Hall in London with seven awards, including best musical revival, best actress in a musical for Scherzinger, best actor in a musical for Tom Francis, as the screenwriter who falls for Desmond’s charms, and best director for Jamie Lloyd.The number of awards was hardly a surprise. After the musical opened last fall, critics praised Lloyd’s stark production, especially highlighting its contemporary twists that included using cameras to zoom in on characters’ faces, then beam their emotions onto a screen at the back of the stage.Matt Wolf, writing in The New York Times, said that Lloyd’s production belonged firmly “to the here and now.” With this show, the director “takes an established musical by the scruff of the neck and sends it careering into the modern day,” Wolf added.Sarah Hemming, in The Financial Times, was among the critics to praise Scherzinger’s magnetic performance. “She’s not afraid to look scary or ridiculous,” Hemming said, “but there’s also a strung-out vulnerability about her. And when she sings, she pins you to your seat with the harrowing intensity of her delivery.”“Sunset Boulevard” beat several other acclaimed productions to the best musical revival award, including “Guys & Dolls” at the Bridge Theater and “Hadestown” at the Lyric Theater.Sarah Snook in “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” a solo version for which she won best actress at the Olivier Awards. Snook plays 26 roles in the show.Marc BrennerA host of musicals and plays shared the night’s other major prizes. “Operation Mincemeat,” a word-of-mouth hit about a bizarre World War II counterintelligence plot that is running at the Fortune Theater, won best new musical. While “Stranger Things: The First Shadow,” a prequel to the Netflix show, now at the Phoenix Theater, was chosen as best new entertainment or comedy play.The best new play award went to James Graham’s “Dear England,” about the English national soccer team, which transferred to the West End from the National Theater.In the hotly contested acting categories, Sarah Snook (“Succession”) was named best actress for “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” a solo show running through May 11 at the Theater Royal Haymarket. Snook plays all 26 roles, often interacting with recorded projections of her characters.Before Sunday’s ceremony, some critics had expected the best actor award to go to Andrew Scott for a similarly dazzling solo performance: a one-man “Vanya” at the Duke of York’s Theater. In the end, the prize went to Mark Gatiss for his role as the revered actor and director John Gielgud in “The Motive and the Cue,” a play by Jack Thorne that dramatizes the fraught backstage relationship between Gielgud and Richard Burton as they worked on a Broadway show. Like “Dear England,” that play ran at the National Theater before transferring to the West End. More