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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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      ‘Buena Vista Social Club’ Brings the Thrill of Music Making to Broadway

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      A new musical inspired by the 1997 hit album gives a fictional back story to the veteran performers of the Havana music scene.The spirit of the musical “Buena Vista Social Club” is evident in its opening scene. Audience members have barely settled into their seats before a group of onstage musicians strikes up the number “El Carretero,” with the rest of the cast gathered around and watching. Some are leaning in from their chairs, others get up and dance on the side. 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.Oh, there have been shows that have effectively pulled the curtain on the process — David Adjmi’s play “Stereophonic” takes place inside recording studios, and the most effective scenes in “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical” are set in one as well. But the interconnections between musicians, songs and a society have rarely been evoked as vividly, and as lovingly, as they are in “Buena Vista Social Club,” which opened on Wednesday at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater. (This improved version follows the show’s Off Broadway run at Atlantic Theater Company, which premiered in December 2023.)As its title indicates, this production, directed by Saheem Ali, is inspired by the 1997 hit album “Buena Vista Social Club,” on which veterans of the Havana scene performed beloved sons, danzones and boleros from the traditional Cuban repertoire. Many of those songs and others are in the musical (a booklet in the Playbill introduces each one, with illustrations by the flutist Hery Paz), along with most of those musicians and singers. Or at least versions of them are. Tellingly, the book by Marco Ramirez (“The Royale”) identifies the characters by their first names only, as if to underline that this is more of an evocative flight of fancy than a biomusical — Ramirez makes the most of musical theater’s notoriously loose relationship with facts.The action travels back and forth between 1956, in the tense time leading up to the toppling of the autocratic Batista regime, and 1996, when the young producer Juan de Marcos (Justin Cunningham) assembles a backing band for the older singers he’s brought into the studio. (The British executive producer Nick Gold and the American guitarist and producer Ry Cooder played important parts in the “Buena Vista Social Club” album and the Wim Wenders documentary that followed, but the musical doesn’t mention them. Instead it focuses on de Marcos’s role in putting together the band and singers.)The show toggles between 1996 and 1956, where the young performers Compay (Da’von T. Moody), Omara (Isa Antonetti) and Ibrahim (Wesley Wray) bond over their love of traditional Cuban music.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe 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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      “We Had a World” Review: A Poignant New Play From Joshua Harmon

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      Joshua Harmon’s new play features uniformly standout performances and tells a poignant story of family dynamics.At the onset of Joshua Harmon’s wonderfully textured new play, “We Had a World,” Josh (played by Andrew Barth Feldman) is in his tighty-whities, scribbling in a notebook with a mechanical pencil at a desk on a corner of the stage. Just then his Nana — his dying Nana, to be specific — shows up onstage with a request. She has an idea for a play her grandson should write, a vicious “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf”-style work about their family.The play we’re seeing, in the intimate basement-esque New York City Center Stage II of the Manhattan Theater Club, is the playwright’s answer to his grandmother’s request. It’s not as vitriolic as Nana had asked for, but it is an all too relatable unpacking of the longstanding resentments and challenging dynamics of a family, particularly the ones between two of the central women in his life, his mother and his grandmother. If there’s viciousness here, it’s the complex, often vicious nature of the truth.“We Had a World” is a memory play in which Josh breaks the fourth wall to guide the audience through notable incidents of his childhood and adult life relating to his mother and grandmother. Though the play opens with a phone call between Josh and his Nana at the end of her life, he jumps back chronologically to explain growing up with his grandmother, Renee (Joanna Gleason), an eccentric Manhattanite who takes him to the theater to see “Medea” and to exhibitions of the work of Robert Mapplethorpe. She sneaks them in to catch movies for free and they make regular visits at the Met Museum. He credits his grandmother with helping him find his future vocation in the theater. But it’s not long before he discovers a secret about Renee: she’s an alcoholic, which is the source of years of animosity between her and Josh’s mother, Ellen (Jeanine Serralles), a tough lawyer with a chip on her shoulder.“We Had a World” gradually works its way back to, and a little bit past, Renee’s decline and death, though not in a way that’s at all predictable or even linear. Josh remembers and cleverly revises the story as he goes, with Renee and Ellen appearing onstage not just as puppets in his story, manipulated by his telling, but also as autonomous characters who express their own opinions (often, hilariously, at his expense) and intrude to offer their perspectives on events.Harmon’s script doesn’t feel as didactic or self-consciously stagy as many contemporary memory plays can be; it strikes an impressive balance of negotiating a story with many adverse emotional perspectives and moving parts while also maintaining a sense of honesty. I don’t just mean honesty in the sense of facts — though the verifiable biographical facts in Harmon’s story, and a bit of recorded material at the end, lend a gravitas to the characters and occurrences. I mean honesty in the sense of emotional transparency, the very real mix of love and resentment and insecurities and doubts that define all relationships, especially those within a family.Though the script successfully condenses several eras of Harmon’s life and captures the quirks and particularities of his mother’s and grandmother’s personalities, the performances really give the material its extra emotional heft. It takes less than 15 minutes to fall in love with Gleason as Renee, the native New Yorker with a dark sense of humor, a love for ornate French furniture and an inexplicable pseudo-British accent. And Serralles’s Ellen feels most real when she is at her most defensive and sardonic, though her shifts into the character’s more openly vulnerable moments still show some seams.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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      She May Be the Most Powerful Producer Working in Theater

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      Sonia Friedman may just be the most prolific and powerful theater producer working today.Over the past 30 years, she has become a peerless figure in the West End, where last year she had a record-setting seven shows running simultaneously, and on Broadway, where she has produced five of the past six Tony Award winners for best play. She has been entrusted both with prestige work by celebrated writers like Tom Stoppard and Stephen Sondheim and with stage adaptations of hugely valuable intellectual property like “Harry Potter,” “Stranger Things” and “Paddington.”But she’s endlessly restless. Taking for granted neither the sustainability of the business nor the security of her own place in it, she has become ever more worried about the industry’s future.A lifelong Londoner, Friedman spends about one-third of each year in New York, but she hasn’t bought an apartment, and only in January started renting, after decades of hotel stays.“I live, literally, with a suitcase in the hall,” she said during one of several interviews. “It could all end tomorrow here. It could all end tomorrow there. And it might. It really might. That’s always how I work. The drive is: It could all end tomorrow. It’s not necessarily a nice way to live, is it?”For years she has expressed concern about the high costs of producing on Broadway, particularly when compared to the West End, but her concern has intensified since the pandemic, as rising costs for labor, materials and services have driven show budgets — and ticket prices for hot shows — ever higher. She said, for example, that “The Hills of California,” a family drama by Jez Butterworth that she produced last year in both cities, faced production costs that were 350 percent higher in New York than in London.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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      Review: Eight Andrew Scotts in a Heartbreaking Solo ‘Vanya’

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      In the original text it is merely a kiss, or as mere as a kiss can be between a beautiful young woman and her husband’s handsome doctor. In any case, knowing as we do from the long-simmering buildup how much the doctor loves her — and likely she him — we accept and even require their moment of consummation, sensing it will be the only deep happiness either ever feels.That kiss, between Astrov and Yelena, as their names are traditionally given, is the sadder of the two sad climaxes of “Uncle Vanya,” Chekhov’s tragicomic comic tragedy about work and waste. (The funnier sad climax occurs when the title character tries to shoot the husband and misses, twice, at close range.) Whatever else happens in a production of the play, the would-be lovers’ intimacy needs to mark an extreme turn in the characters’ lives and in the narrative’s emotional temperature as it comes in for its final landing.So you’d think the moment would totally flop if both he and she were played by one actor.Yet in “Vanya,” the Chekhov adaptation that opened on Tuesday at the Lucille Lortel Theater, the encounter is about as erotic as any the legitimate stage has offered, even though it involves just a door, two arms and the human Swiss Army knife Andrew Scott.Granted, it’s more than a smooch. Scott basically humps the door. And when he claws off his shirt, it is from both characters’ backs.But this is not just a stunt to see whether a single actor can pull off a full-cast classic. As adapted by Simon Stephens, the author of “Heisenberg,” “Sea Wall” and other gripping dramas, “Vanya” is deeply serious and generally faithful in its engagement with Chekhov, offering not just a modernized gloss on the play’s language and settings (the husband is a pompous old filmmaker instead of a pompous old scholar) but also a new way of seeing into the heart of its beauty.And anyway, what’s so wrong with a stunt when it becomes a tour de force? Who doesn’t gasp with delight at a bicyclist doing cartwheels on a tightrope? Scott is endlessly and polymorphously resourceful, with an armamentarium of voices, faces, postures and ideas that in various combinations add up to a thousand specific effects. And though I already knew this from his “regular” roles in movies like “All of Us Strangers,” and from a solo multicamera pandemic experiment called “Three Kings,” he produces these effects with no strain and no false modesty, and without ever dropping the ball of emotion.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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      ‘Amerikin’ Review: A White Supremacist’s Undoing: DNA

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      The protagonist of Chisa Hutchinson’s new play is proud of his racial heritage, until he gets some unexpected test results.There was a guy I knew when I was in my teens. Blond and blue-eyed, popular at the beach, he named his puppy after a superstar. It made him laugh to let people in on the gut-punch nasty joke behind it: that, as far as he was concerned, both were black female dogs.Chisa Hutchinson’s layered new play, “Amerikin,” has me thinking about that for the first time in decades. Her central character, Jeff, has named his own dog in the same spirit — after a racist slur that he is not shy about shouting into the neighborhood to summon his pup. I’d hate for anyone to think that detail was too exaggerated. Not in these United States it isn’t.Directed by Jade King Carroll for Primary Stages, “Amerikin” is set in Sharpsburg, Md., which was Confederate country back when the bloody Battle of Antietam was waged nearby during the Civil War. In 2017, it is Trump country, and when the working-class Jeff (Daniel Abeles) and his wife, Michelle (Molly Carden), take their newborn son home, Jeff is eager to give the child he adores every social advantage in their small town.If that means accepting an invitation from his pal Dylan (Luke Robertson) to join the local white supremacist group, Jeff would be honored. It would bolster his sense of belonging in this place where he’s lived since childhood.But his nomination comes with an asterisk: He must take a DNA test to prove that he is 100 percent white. To his alarm, the results say otherwise — and even though his tech-savvy best friend, Poot (Tobias Segal), doctors the results, word gets out.And you know what happens when a band of white racists discovers a nonwhite family living in its midst. As Gerald (Victor Williams), a reporter for The Washington Post, frames it in a headline: “White Supremacist Hopeful Becomes Target of His Own Hate.”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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      ‘Purpose’ Review: Dinner With the Black Political Elite

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      A family not unlike Jesse Jackson’s gets barbecued on Broadway by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins.You may have trouble catching your breath from laughing so hard during the first act of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s sophomore Broadway outing, “Purpose,” which opened Monday at the Helen Hayes Theater. Deeply imagined and grave beneath its yucks, it unspools like a brilliant sitcom.Then, also like a sitcom, it jumps the shark.Ah well, mixed emotions go with the territory. If “Purpose” is primarily a merciless dissection of hypocrisy in an important religious-political Black American family — the Jesse Jackson dynasty comes to mind — it is also a grudging love letter to them in all their God-praising, backroom-dealing, self-promotional glory. The problem is that in the constant switchback of perspectives, the play, directed by Phylicia Rashad, grows too hectic and attenuated to maintain a line of conviction.The same could be said of the family, the Jaspers. Chicago-based like the Jacksons — the play originated at the Steppenwolf Theater Company in that city — they, too, are headed by an oratorical pastor who, in his youth, worked closely with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Also familiar are several possible unauthorized offspring, hushed up but not quite silent. Jacobs-Jenkins cannot help noting that among that generation of Bible-quoting civil rights worthies are enough sins of the father to burden a host of sons.Indeed, approaching 80 and withdrawn from the front lines, Solomon Jasper (Harry Lennix) now reserves most of his thunder for his family. His formidable wife, Claudine, a honeyed matriarch with a law degree, is tough enough to shape it to her own ends as needed. But on their disappointing sons falls the brunt of Solomon’s biblical disapproval.The older son, named for his father, is the more obviously wayward. Raised to uphold Solomon’s political legacy, Junior (Glenn Davis) instead tarnished it when, as a state senator, he was convicted of embezzling campaign funds. These he spent, according to his embittered wife, Morgan, on “cashmere drawers and betting on racing pigeons.”From left, Jackson, Hill, Young and Alana Arenas.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe 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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      In ‘Weather Girl,’ Climate Change Sets Off a Meltdown

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      A new one-woman show from the producer of “Baby Reindeer” and “Fleabag” is an irreverent allegory about wildfires and global warming.At the Soho Theater in London, a beleaguered weather reporter is giving double meaning to the phrase “hot mess.” The setting is drought-stricken Fresno, Calif., where temperatures are sweltering and wildfires rage on the city outskirts. The presenter, Stacey Gross, has a telegenic glamour and some peppy catchphrases, but underneath is an angst-ridden functioning alcoholic who secretly quaffs Prosecco on the job. She suspects her TV station is misleading viewers about the role that climate change has played in the fires, and as the heat wave progresses she has a meltdown, embarking on a cathartic, booze-fueled rampage featuring wanton destruction, kidnapping and karaoke.“Weather Girl” has arrived in London amid plenty of hype, following a successful run at last year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The show’s producer, Francesca Moody, has a knack of turning Fringe plays into television hits — she was behind “Fleabag” and “Baby Reindeer” — and a Netflix adaptation of “Weather Girl” is already in development, according to the trade publication Deadline. The show’s title character is played by Julia McDermott, who also takes several other parts in this lively but slightly undercooked one-woman show, an irreverent but serious climate change allegory that runs through April 5.The show’s title character has a telegenic glamour but underneath is an angst-ridden functioning alcoholic who secretly quaffs Prosecco on the job.Pamela RaithWearing a bright blouse, hot pink skirt and heels, McDermott performs on a bare stage, with just a colored screen behind her as an allusive backdrop. Her only prop is a trusty Stanley Tumbler. Over the course of 60 frenetic minutes, her character regales the audience in a fraught, high-tempo monologue about Stacey’s escapades in drinking holes with names like Malibu Nights and the Antelope Lounge. 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