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    In ‘Operation Mincemeat,’ the Theater of War Is a Comedy

    How a theater collective transformed the too-weird-to-be-true story of a World War II counterintelligence scheme into a West End musical with heart.The inflatable tanks had to go.At one time, those tanks were a feature of “Operation Mincemeat,” a punchy, plucky, highly unlikely West End musical, which tells the even more unlikely story of an MI-5 escapade. It describes how, in 1942, British Intelligence outfitted an unclaimed corpse as a member of the Royal Marines and delivered the body to the shores of Spain, trusting that German sympathizers would study faked documents planted on the body. It worked. That was hardly the craziest part.“Part of the joy was that the crazy stuff was all true,” said Natasha Hodgson, a member of the theater collective SplitLip, which created the show.But there was so very much crazy stuff. And during early performances, the audience had doubts. They especially doubted the dummy Sherman tanks, which the Allies created to misdirect the Germans. So the tanks were cut. As were other details.“We had to take the truth out because it was too silly,” the composer Felix Hagan, another member of SplitLip said.This was on a recent morning in London. The show’s four creators — Hagan, Hodgson, David Cumming and Zoë Roberts — had gathered in the lobby bar of the Fortune Theater to discuss, excitedly, how a glam punk musician and three writer-performers previously known for bloodpack-heavy horror comedies had created the feel-good West End musical of the summer.The musical’s dozens of roles — secretaries, sailors, spies — are played by just five performers, including Roberts, Cumming and Hodgson.Matt CrockettCumming, Hodgson and Roberts met more than a decade ago, at the University of Warwick, bonding over a shared love of horror movies. With two other classmates, they created the devised company Kill the Beast, which specialized in unusually gruesome comedy, sometimes involving werewolves.The company had several successes at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. “But it was quite clear that we were going to stay niche,” Cumming said. Shows about tentacled beasts and children devoured by rats were never built for the mainstream.Music had always been an integral component of Kill the Beast shows, which made a full-scale musical an almost logical next step. As Hodgson and Hagan were in a band together, inviting him on as a composer made sense, too. With his addition, SplitLip was formed. What was missing? A story. Which Hodgson found on a family holiday when her brother encouraged her to listen to an episode of a podcast detailing the events of Operation Mincemeat.“I was just like, oh my God, this is the craziest, most amazing, hilarious, horrifying story I’ve ever heard,” Hodgson said. In other words: Perfect. She told her colleagues that they were going to have to write a musical about World War II. No tentacles necessary.There was brief dissension. (Cumming described a World War II story as “the least cool thing you can do.”) But on learning the details, everyone was persuaded. Because, as a character in the musical would later say of the Mincemeat plan, “It’s bizarre, it’s disgusting, it’s borderline psychopathic.”On the strength of a scene and two songs, the show was booked into a five-week run at London’s New Diorama Theater. Which gave the company a hectic and unglamorous nine months to write it. Some of that writing was done in an unheated studio space. The collaborators would take turns riding an exercise bike, just to keep warm.There were several discussions about musical style. Hagan had considered restricting himself to period forms, then rejected that restriction. The resulting score is eclectic, moving among pop, R&B, stride piano. The song that closes the first act transitions between sea chantey and electronic dance music, the EDM a play on a submarine’s pinging sonar.“We needed to make sure it didn’t feel old,” Cumming said.Cumming, Hodgson and Roberts knew that they would star, for financial reasons as much as creative ones. They auditioned for two more singers, a high tenor and a high soprano, then began to divvy up the dozens of roles — secretaries, sailors, a Russian spy, Ian Fleming — among the five performers, with men often playing women’s roles and women playing men’s, without camp or fanfare.“It’s a quietly queer show,” Cumming said. That queerness helped to complicate the story, chafing against its wealthy white male triumphalism by showing who was and wasn’t allowed to make decisions, who was and wasn’t given credit.In writing the script, they agreed to never change the story’s facts, even as they allowed themselves a playful approach to the characters. Yet the facts were often incredible. After an invited dress rehearsal, SplitLip read through feedback forms, some of which scolded the company for lying about history. (“The dads,” Roberts said, “can be very defensive about the war.”)They hadn’t lied, but they had jettisoned the tanks and other particulars: MI-5 employees cosplaying the fake marine, a near car crash on the way to the submarine, courtesy of a blind driver.Still, the show that debuted at the 80-seat New Diorama was a shambolic one (one song lasted about 25 minutes), with an unwieldy second act rewritten just days before opening. The company didn’t really know what they had.“I liken it to getting dressed in the road,” Hodgson said. “Our first performance just felt nude. Like, ‘Is this good?’”The audience thought so. Producers agreed. There were conversations about where the show might go from there.“That’s the first time anyone’s ever said that. Usually, they’re just like, Cool, what’s next?” Cumming said.“Funnily enough, at our werewolf comedy, tears did not flow,” Roberts said. “We were still taken aback by how passionately people cared about these characters and felt for them.”Ellie Smith for The New York TimesThe show transferred to other London venues, Southwark Playhouse and Riverside Studios. A half-hour was cut. (It now runs just over two hours.) That 25-minute song was drastically shortened. At the New Diorama, the show’s creators discovered that audiences connected with the story’s emotional beats and that they wanted more of them. This was a surprise.“Funnily enough, at our werewolf comedy, tears did not flow,” Roberts said. “We were still taken aback by how passionately people cared about these characters and felt for them.” Initially “Operation Mincemeat” had leaned away from emotional moments, undercutting them with jokes. Increasingly, the show leaned in.For the West End transfer, a director and a choreographer were hired. A “glitzy finale” was added. A larger cast was mooted, even a chorus, but the creators realized that the frenetic, quick-change, make-do-ness of the show was much of its appeal and a kind of slant rhyme with history. Then, a small group of officers had effected a piece of theater that made the Germans divert 100,000 troops. Now, a small troupe could transport hundreds of audience members into a new world every night.“The Operation Mincemeat story is about giving just enough evidence to the Nazis to make them believe something that isn’t actually there,” Cumming said. “That’s exactly the same game that we’re playing. Just five people onstage giving you enough clues here and there.”The reviews for the show have been ecstatic. And despite some characteristic British modesty, the creators think they understand why. Even as the show, through its casting and satire, is unsympathetic to the conservative structures of British intelligence, it is ultimately admiring of the very English ingenuity and eccentricity of the people, almost exclusively straight white men, who birthed and accomplished the plan.“We want to celebrate the things that they did while being incredibly aware that the opportunities that were given to do all this were because of a system that allowed them, and no one else, to have those opportunities,” Hodgson said.It’s a tricky balancing act, this patriotism and this skepticism. But a company of five that constantly swaps hats and jackets is accustomed to acrobatics. Sometimes those hats get dropped. (“Everything has gone wrong every possible which way,” Hodgson said. “There’s nothing that can really throw us.”) But the overwhelming impression is of hopefulness, expansiveness, possibility and joy.“Joy has always been our principle in everything,” Roberts said. “The darker the world gets, people need joy.” More

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    Taylor Kitsch Is No Longer a Leading Man. He’s OK With That.

    There are easier ways.If you are, let’s say, a rangy 5-feet-11-inches, with an athlete’s build, burnished skin and a heedless, sad-eyed charisma that makes audiences lean in so far they fall over, Hollywood offers smoother paths. If you look, just a little, like a god who overslept, then you don’t have to learn Shoshone or master “My Sharona” or lose weight or gain weight or have panic attacks. And if you have spent years helping a close family member survive an opioid addiction, you don’t have to take a role that asks you to portray a similar addiction, to immerse yourself in that pain and terror and need.But Taylor Kitsch does.In “Painkiller,” a six-episode series arriving on Netflix on Aug. 10, Kitsch plays Glen Kryger, the owner of a North Carolina auto repair shop. After Glen is prescribed OxyContin for a workplace injury, he descends into addiction. Slowly, at first, then in free fall.Kitsch wanted the role. It reunited him with his frequent collaborator, the producer and director Peter Berg. It felt meaningful. And Glen is the kind of part that has defined the latter half of Kitsch’s career, characters who look at first like leading men but slip from that groove because they’re too wounded, too vulnerable, too compromised. Still, he couldn’t read through even the first script without breaking down.“I’m like, Wait, there’s so much still that’s very raw,” he recalled thinking. “Then I was like, OK”Kitsch, 42, was speaking on a morning in late June, on the patio of a house in the mountains above Santa Fe, N.M. Pinyon pines squatted in the red dirt just beyond the patio’s edge. Hummingbirds whirred overhead. A heavy bag, off its chain, slumped in a corner. Kitsch had been here for months, shooting another Netflix show with Berg, “American Primeval,” a series set on the American frontier in the 1850s, due out next year. The 20 pounds he had lost for that role left him skinny in his skinny jeans, sun-roughened and bearded. Moccasins hid a broken toe, mostly healed. (This interview and others were completed before the SAG-AFTRA strike.)In “Painkiller,” Kitsch’s character runs an auto repair shop with his wife (Carolina Bartczak) until an OxyContin addiction upends his life.Keri Anderson/NetflixOffscreen, Kitsch’s persona is lighter, looser, more inclined to gesture and joke. But there’s a lonesomeness at the core of him that makes women want to save him and men want to buy him a beer. I am a mother of young children and the temptation to offer him a snack was sometimes overwhelming.The shoot was almost over (though the strike would halt it a week from completion), and Kitsch’s father, who had been absent for most of his life, had just died. He seemed stranded somewhere between character and self, more inclined to use the first-person when he talked about a role than when he spoke more personally. “You’re hungry,” he would say. “You’re about to melt down.”Kitsch grew up in British Columbia, mostly with his mother and older brothers. Later, two half sisters were born. Injuries ended a hockey career before it really began, and after a brief and mostly unsuccessful stint as a model, he began auditioning for film roles. In school, he had always liked acting, liked the attention it brought. (“I was the funny guy at school at all costs,” he said.) And he had done some background work as a teenager. He had no formal training, but his looks were enough to land him a few small roles.Then he auditioned for “Friday Night Lights,” the NBC series set in the world of Texas high school football, which premiered in 2006. Other young men had been shortlisted to play Tim Riggins, the team’s troubled fullback. But in a Hail Mary play, Kitsch’s manager drove him onto the NBC lot. Berg, who developed that series, remembers watching Kitsch step out of the car, the sunlight in his hair.“And I said, ‘Oh [expletive], this guy’s it,’” Berg recalled. Kitsch, he said, had a strength to him, an old-school stoicism, veined with vulnerability. “But what makes him special is that he contains these energies, he doesn’t lead with them,” Berg said. “He doesn’t work too hard.”Riggins, a cocky, fatherless athlete from a blue-collar family, mirrored Kitsch’s own background. Berg trusted him to write lines for the character, to suggest motives and moves. The show also gave him space to fail, to learn what would and wouldn’t work on camera. On set, Kitsch gravitated toward the older actors, taking their advice, studying their techniques.As the show wrapped its fifth and final season in 2011, Kitsch lined up back-to-back-to-back roles in two blockbusters (“John Carter,” “Battleship”) and a sexy thriller (“Savages”), a slate that announced his status as Hollywood’s next leading man. The films all underperformed. He chose smaller films after that and returned briefly to television, starring in the second season of the moody HBO procedural “True Detective.” Back then, in the mid 2010s, he couldn’t always get out of his own way. He sabotaged relationships, he said. He sabotaged himself.Kitsch was given leading-man parts after “Friday Night Lights,” but “I just wanted to be a character actor that buzzed into certain things and, hopefully, made you evoke something,” he said.Tag Christof for The New York TimesHollywood didn’t seem to know what to do with him at the time, and Kitsch, who moved first to Texas and then to Montana, didn’t know what to do with Hollywood either. He kept sliding out from under leading man parts. As a kid, he had wanted attention. Now, in his 30s, he found that he wanted to disappear.“Whatever it is that motivates other people — fame, money, celebrity, more followers, I don’t [expletive] know — it was never like that,” Kitsch said. “I just wanted to be a character actor that buzzed into certain things and, hopefully, made you evoke something.”In these years, he also found himself caring for one of his younger sisters, Shelby Kitsch-Best, who was struggling with addiction to opioids and other drugs. He took time off, coaxing her into detox and sober living facilities, taking her to the hospital when she relapsed.“He literally put his life on hold to help me,” Kitsch-Best, now seven years sober, said in a recent interview. “I don’t even know how to put it in words.”For his next major project, he signed on to play the cult leader David Koresh in “Waco,” a 2018 Paramount limited series. He lost weight, learned guitar, took voice lessons, practiced one of Koresh’s sermons “a thousand-plus” times, he said. Though he gave himself his first panic attack, a month ahead of filming, the preparation worked: Kitsch is unrecognizable in the role.I asked him if he could perhaps have done less. He didn’t think so. Because he has no training to fall back on, no technique, he feels the need to bring himself as close to a character — physically, psychically — as possible.“The only thing that eliminates self-doubt for me is prep,” he said. He never wants to look back and think that he could have done more.Betty Gilpin, who also stars in “American Primeval,” bet that Kitsch, who learned some Shoshone and worked with a medicine man to prepare for his role as a white man raised by a Native tribe, had done more research than anyone else on set. “The purpose of it seems to be so he can be lost in the work and to have freedom in the work,” she said in a recent interview.Kitsch asked his sister Shelby Kitsch-Best, a former addict, to help him accurately portray his character’s experiences.Keri Anderson/Netflix“Painkiller” — based on the Barry Meier book “Pain Killer: An Empire of Deceit and the Origin of America’s Opioid Epidemic” and the Patrick Radden Keefe article “The Family That Built an Empire of Pain,” in The New Yorker — is the second prestige series, after “Dopesick,” to limn the opioid epidemic. This project demanded a particular kind of preparation, much of it emotional. Glen is a composite character, a stand-in for the many, many Americans who became addicted to OxyContin after their doctors prescribed it. He is there to illustrate that addiction doesn’t discriminate — it doesn’t care how good you are, how principled, how strong.“Taylor was the perfect guy to take us on that trip,” said Eric Newman, an executive producer of “Painkiller.” “If it can happen to him, it can happen to anyone.”Kitsch knew this. It had happened to his sister. Years before, he had written her a letter, telling her that he wished he could take her pain from her. He couldn’t. But in playing Glen, he could honor it, at least. He asked her to accompany him on set, as an adviser, as long as she felt comfortable.“I was like: ‘Are you sure? You’re not going to relapse if you see me faking using Oxy,’” Kitsch recalled. “She was like, ‘I think I’m good.’”Glen, a hard worker and a family man, should be the hero of this story. Instead, he’s one of the victims. And Kitsch, who gained 25 pounds for the role (“this guy is a beer and sandwich kind of guy,” he said), forgoes vanity in scenes in which Glen spills urine on himself or struggles to lift a tire or overdoses in a pancake house. Kitsch understood Glen, up to a point. He knows what it is to be in pain — emotional, physical — and to want that pain to go away.But he asked Kitsch-Best to help him with the particulars, like how someone might look and feel if they were using or in withdrawal. “He really wanted very specific details about what’s going on in someone’s mind and how that would manifest in their body,” she said. “Those things are difficult to watch because it’s so real. But it’s good how real it is.”With Berg’s blessing, Kitsch-Best filmed a brief cameo as a nurse at a methadone clinic and helped to choreograph a detox scene. “She’d be like, ‘Go bigger, you’d be sweating more,’” Kitsch said. “Bringing her was incredibly cathartic and obviously full circle. I was the emotional mess, and she was just killing it.”Kitsch works less than he used to. “If I can’t be all in and really be in service of something and be scared and be uncomfortable, then I don’t want to do that,” he said.Tag Christof for The New York TimesWhen Berg first sent Kitsch the “Painkiller” script, he did so knowing his family history. And Berg could tell that the shoot was sometimes hard for him. “But that’s where the gold is, when you’ve got an actor who’s that emotionally connected to something,” Berg said. “I knew he wasn’t going to walk away or break down. It wasn’t going to beat him. He would take that emotion and funnel it into Glen. It was a really a beautiful thing to bear witness to.”Kitsch doesn’t break down much these days, and he enjoys his time outside of work, which wasn’t always a given. Between shoots, he hikes, he fly fishes, he tracks and photographs the wolves that live near his home. (Everyone I spoke to asked if he had told me about the wolves. Boy, had he.) “I’ve started to live a little more,” he said. He also bought 22 acres in Montana that he plans to make available as a sober retreat, with simple A-frame houses, maybe a sweat lodge.Kitsch works less than he used to. After taking time off to help his sister, he never returned at quite the same pace. “I pride myself on being picky, because it is so much energy and sacrifice,” he said. “If I can’t be all in and really be in service of something and be scared and be uncomfortable, then I don’t want to do that.”This isn’t necessarily the life that his early career promised or that his looks ordained, but it works for him. Toward the end of our conversation, I told him that when I first entered his name into a search bar, the first question Google suggested was, “What happened to Taylor Kitsch?”So what did happen? Kitsch gave me one of his unhurried smiles. “What happened?” he said. “I was doing character stuff.”Though he started out as a pretty boy, he has made himself into an actor, which has meant a narrower path and likely a more arduous one “The people that really know me, or that follow the career will understand it,” he added. “Because I’m not so famous.”He seemed to like that fine. More

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    Michael Boyd, 68, Who Invigorated the Royal Shakespeare Company, Dies

    He is credited with stabilizing that venerable British troupe while energizing it with ambitious projects, including Broadway’s “Matilda the Musical.” Michael Boyd, who led the Royal Shakespeare Company as artistic director from 2002 to 2012, a decade in which he stabilized the organization while undertaking ambitious projects including a heralded New York residency and the mounting of the un-Shakespearean hit show “Matilda the Musical,” died on Thursday at his home in London. He was 68.His family, in a statement posted on the Royal Shakespeare Company’s website, said the cause was cancer.Mr. Boyd had a distinguished career as a director stretching back to the early 1980s, when he was with the Belgrade Theater in Coventry, England. Work he directed there and in a subsequent stop at the Tron in Glasgow — a gritty urban musical called “Risky City,” a reimagined “Macbeth,” an adaptation of Janice Galloway’s novel “The Trick Is to Keep Breathing” and more — caught the attention of playgoers and critics.And in 1996 it earned him an appointment as an associate director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he continued to direct well-regarded productions and, in 2002, stepped up to artistic director.He took the job at a time when that venerable company was facing challenges and criticism, including over its recent decision to vacate its longtime home, the Barbican Center in London, and scale back its ensemble work. Michael Billington, a theater critic for The Guardian, had criticized the outgoing director, Adrian Noble, for “attempting to create a revolution within the R.S.C. culture without getting the approval of the theater profession or the public.”Mr. Boyd, during his decade at the helm, brought audiences back; oversaw the renovation of the company’s theater complex at Stratford-upon-Avon; created a reproduction of its classical theater in the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan for a five-play residency in 2011; and set in motion the World Shakespeare Festival of 2012, a multicity celebration involving more than 50 arts organizations.Mr. Boyd, The Guardian said in summarizing his decade of leadership, presided “over a spectacular financial and architectural turnaround.”In announcing in 2011 that he was stepping away, he said the job had begun to wear on him.“I’ve always said it would take 10 years to do something significant towards the life and the spirit of the company,” he told The Birmingham Evening Mail, “though more than 10 years would potentially not be so good for the life and the spirit of the artistic director.”But Mr. Boyd was hardly done. He continued to direct notable productions, including “Tamburlaine, Parts I and II,” the Christopher Marlowe classic, for Theater for a New Audience in New York in 2014. It’s a bloody tale from 1587 about the warrior Tamburlaine, and Mr. Boyd didn’t hold back; the show used 144 gallons of stage blood a week. For one effect, blood was pumped from beneath the stage so that it would creep up the skirt of a particular character.“We’ve designed a costume that’s very absorbent,” Mr. Boyd told The New York Times.Ben Brantley, reviewing the show for The Times, said that “Mr. Boyd manages to balance the distancing effects of a Brechtian epic with the rock ’em-sock ’em thrills of a Michael Bay action flick.”A scene from “Tamburlaine, Parts I and II,” which Mr. Boyd directed for the Theater for a New Audience in New York in 2014. The show used 144 gallons of stage blood a week. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMr. Boyd’s relationship with Theater for a New Audience went back years. Jeffrey Horowitz, the company’s founding artistic director, noted that in 2007 Mr. Boyd had invited the group to bring its “Macbeth” to Royal Shakespeare’s Complete Works Festival, at which all of Shakespeare’s works were presented at Stratford-upon-Avon.“Michael Boyd’s generosity had a huge impact on T.F.A.N.A.,” Mr. Horowitz said by email. As for “Tamburlaine,” the 2014 production, he said, “Michael created an extraordinary sense of community in the acting company, instilling a passion for discovering and communicating what was living in Marlowe’s text now rather than being didactic about meaning.”John Michael Boyd was born on July 6, 1955, in Belfast, Northern Ireland. His father, John, was a doctor, and his mother, Sheila (Small) Boyd, taught art. Michael was raised in London, but when he was a teenager the family moved to Edinburgh, where the vibrant theater and festival scene grabbed him.“It was massively overwhelming,” he told The Daily Telegraph of Britain in 2002, “a crash course in all the different things that theater could be.”After earning a degree in English at the University of Edinburgh, Mr. Boyd won a fellowship to spend a year studying theater in Moscow under Anatoly V. Efros, a leading Soviet director.“What I loved about Efros,” he told The Telegraph, “was his combination of bold visual flair with a complex understanding of humanity” — attributes that described much of Mr. Boyd’s work in the ensuing years.Some of his earliest directorial work was at the theater in Coventry, a fast-paced, adventurous house.“It was a mad time,” he told The Coventry Evening Telegraph in 2002. “I remember doing 10 productions in one year, but it was also a very fruitful time for me.”A scene in 2013 from “Matilda the Musical,” a treatment of the Roald Dahl story, as staged on Broadway by the R.S.C. under Mr. Boyd. It ran for almost four years.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBy 1986 he was at the Tron, another buzzing theater. For his “Macbeth” there in 1993, he surprised audiences right from the start, opening not with the usual witches’ prologue but with three cellists playing a dirge while corpses were stacked in an open grave.“It is a brilliant opening which demands an immediate reorientation of the responses of the audience,” John Linklater wrote in a review in The Herald of Glasgow. “The physical and moral geography of the play is drastically rearranged.”Just before he was named artistic director at the Royal Shakespeare Company, which was founded in 1961 by the director Peter Hall, Mr. Boyd won an Olivier Award, the British version of the Tony, for directing the company’s history play cycle, “Henry VI, Parts 1, 2, and 3” and “Richard III.”His marriage to Marcella Evaristi in 1982 ended in divorce. He and Caroline Hall, who had been his partner since 1991, married in 2004. She survives him, along with a daughter from their marriage, Rachael; two children from his first marriage, Daniel and Gabriella; a sister, Susan; and a grandson.One of Mr. Boyd’s bolder moves during his decade as artistic director was overseeing “Matilda the Musical,” a treatment of the Roald Dahl story.The company had long been buoyed by revenue from “Les Misérables,” which it had produced in the 1980s and which ran on Broadway for 16 years in its initial incarnation, but Mr. Boyd knew that a fresh income stream from a popular show was needed. His gamble on “Matilda” paid off: It was a hit in England in 2010 and later ran for almost four years on Broadway.Mr. Brantley, reviewing the Broadway opening for The Times, called it “the most satisfying and subversive musical ever to come out of Britain.” More

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    ‘Strange Planet’ Review: An Alien’s Guide to Being Human

    A new animated series on Apple TV+ examines the banalities of the human experience through an endearingly literal lens.Human beings are strange, though we often don’t like to admit to the arbitrariness of many of our conventions or the contradictions inherent in our behaviors. But the beings of “Strange Planet,” the new Apple TV+ series based on Nathan W. Pyle’s graphic novels and web comics of the same name, embrace the eccentricities of their everyday lives, which look uncannily similar to our own.In Pyle’s original web comic, blue humanoid aliens engage in familiar pastimes like going to amusement parks, throwing parties and playing sports, but they describe those activities and the objects around them with an alternate, more literal vernacular. Their flat way of speaking highlights the subtle absurdity in everything: confetti translates to “tiny trash,” teeth are “mouth stones” and coffee is “jitter liquid.”The “Strange Planet” series, created by Pyle and Dan Harmon (“Rick and Morty,” “Community”) and premiering on Wednesday, successfully marries Pyle’s wholesome, observational humor with Harmon’s love of cerebral, dark-tinted comedy that unpacks the human experience via eccentric characters. For a show that doesn’t actually include any humans (just these “beings,” as they’re called, and various creatures), it has plenty of humanity.Each of the 10 episodes, which will be rolled out weekly, tackles two or three themes, addressed through intersecting story lines. The first episode, titled “The Flying Machine,” is initially about the terrors and thrills of airplane travel (alleviated with the help of “tiny snacks”). But subplots revolving around two passengers drifting apart as a couple and a flight attendant’s promotion turn it into an exploration of how personal and professional relationships must be constantly renegotiated as we grow and our circumstances change.The series replicates Pyle’s art, down to his primary use of blues, purples and pinks. What “Strange Planet” hasn’t figured out, however, is how to formally bridge the gap between the concise format of the comics and the more expansive narrative format of a television series.Whereas Pyle’s beings — bulbous heads tapered down to thin, sexless bodies, like little blue raspberry Tootsie Roll pops — are anonymous in his comics, giving each joke or scenario an isolated quality, they appear recurringly on the show among a gradually widening circle of secondary characters.As the beings aren’t boxed in by gender, race, background, politics or religion, the show gives everyone “they” pronouns and identifies them with clothes and accessories. The beings build out the world, giving it a distinct personality, traditions and history. But they also move the show further away from its quaint existential moments to a more uneven, and less interesting, zany kids’ cartoon model.“Beings evolved over generations to prioritize honesty with other beings to the detriment of their own self-honesty,” one being says to another in one episode. It is a poignant statement, but coming after a silly story line involving power generators, secret cliff-side tunnels and a talent show, it has little impact.The show fares better when it doesn’t try to toggle between thoughtful reflections and ridiculous plot antics. A story line in another episode, inspired by “Before Sunrise,” is much stronger for its simplicity: Two romantic interests spend the day wandering around and discussing their philosophies on life. “I guess all beings look for permanence when the lack of permanence is what makes life so interesting,” one says to the other while shopping. These plain-spoken sentiments give purpose to the beings’ endearing — though inconsistent and occasionally overdone — vocabulary, and give the show a unique gravitas.More often than not, “Strange Planet” is cute and delightful. But when it settles in to its more ephemeral musings and universal thoughts, it’s more than just cute: It’s funny and it’s warm … like a cozy pair of fabric foot tubes right out of the tumble heater. More

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    For ‘Only Murders’ Season 3, Not the Same Old Song and Dance

    Meryl Streep joined the cast for a season that moved much of the action to Broadway, enlisting a musical theater supergroup to write the songs.Meryl Streep was looking for levity — she was “in despair of the world for so many reasons,” she said, namely the climate crisis. So she reached out to the funniest people she could think of: Steve Martin and Martin Short, whose late-career resurgence as a double act has included a touring stage show, TV specials and their Emmy-winning Hulu comedy, “Only Murders in the Building.”“I knew they were doing their tour,” Streep said. “So I just basically called them and said, ‘If you ever want to work together, let’s do something.’”They did. Short and Martin suggested a stint on the third season of “Only Murders,” in which they play, along with Selena Gomez, amateur sleuths and podcasters who solve murders in their Upper West Side apartment building. Streep said yes without knowing what exactly would be required of her, but the series’s co-creator and showrunner John Hoffman already had a part in mind.“It really was like the stars were aligned,” Streep said.As it turned out, not only would she play a prominent guest role as Loretta Durkin, a struggling actress cast in a play directed by Short’s Oliver Putnam; she would also have to sing. (Streep and the other cast members interviewed all spoke before the actors’ strike began.)That’s because Season 3 of “Only Murders,” which premiered on Tuesday, moves out of the building — well, mostly. There is still a murder; viewers saw Paul Rudd drop dead on a stage at the end of Season 2. And technically, the murder still happens in the Arconia (it’s complicated), the stately prewar co-op of the series’s title.But rather than risk letting the show’s winning formula become too formulaic, the producers this season took the investigation to Broadway, where Oliver is staging an original musical. And to do it right, they enlisted the aid of a musical theater supergroup led by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, known for their work on “Dear Evan Hansen” and “La La Land.”Given the cast and creative team assembled, it all makes for a very star-studded love letter to Broadway. Streep likened the experience to being a “theater company.” Paul compared it to “theater camp.”“It was just through and through a Broadway experience — there are just cameras filming it,” Paul said. “There was that same sort of ensemble sense, whether it was Meryl or Paul Rudd or Marty or Steve, that everybody was making this show together.”Paul Rudd, left (with, center left, Gerald Caesar; center right, Steve Martin; and Jason Veasey), plays a vainglorious movie star who makes a lot of enemies. Patrick Harbron/Hulu“Only Murders” has always had show-business jokes — Oliver is known for his legendary flops; Steve Martin’s Charles-Haden Savage is a washed-up TV star — but this season leans even further into its jazz hands impulses. In the premiere, a vainglorious movie star played by Rudd, who is starring in a nonmusical production from Oliver titled “Death Rattle,” is mysteriously offed (it turns out he survived that collapse onstage), potentially by another cast member.Desperate for the show to go on, Oliver tries to save his already absurd production by turning it into a musical: “Death Rattle Dazzle!,” an all-singing spectacle about infant triplets who might have committed murder.Hoffman said he could have played it safe, knowing that the coup was just getting the celebrities on board. Instead he decided to get ambitious with the song and dance numbers.“My idiocy is that instead of containing myself and giving them nothing but great, hopefully, dialogue scenes to do, let’s swing for the fences and go for everything we could possibly dream of,” he said.And it was the stuff of Hoffman’s dreams. He had thought Streep would be right for the part of Loretta but figured it would never happen, before learning that Short and Martin had been speaking with her. He also had Pasek and Paul on his wish list of potential composers when he discovered that one of his writers, Sas Goldberg, was an old friend of theirs. Turns out, they had already expressed interest in contributing when they learned she was on staff.“I was like, if they need a ditty, if they ever need anything, we’re obsessed with that show,” Pasek said. When Goldberg texted to take them up on that offer, “it felt like a very serendipitous moment,” Pasek added.Pasek and Paul just had one condition for Hoffman: They wanted to bring in several top Broadway songwriters to help out. Hoffman said yes.From left: Martin, Selena Gomez and Ryan Broussard in a scene from Season 3, which situates much of the action amid the production of a Broadway musical about murder.Patrick Harbron/HuluIn the show, the songs are written by Oliver, a man who survives mostly on dips and once directed a musical called “Newark! Newark!” In reality, the songs were written by accomplished professionals, who thus had to master a tricky tone: The songs needed to work for a patently ridiculous production but also be genuinely entertaining for viewers at home.For a complicated, ear worm of a patter song that Martin’s character sings as the detective in “Death Rattle Dazzle!,” Pasek and Paul brought on Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman of “Hairspray” and “Some Like It Hot.” (“It was a thrill to sing and a thrill to be done with,” Martin said.) The playwright and composer Michael R. Jackson, whose musical “A Strange Loop” won a Pulitzer Prize and two Tonys, contributed a late-season showstopper for Streep.The Tony-nominated and Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Sara Bareilles was called in to co-write a lullaby titled “Look for the Light,” which Streep’s Loretta, playing a nanny in the musical, delivers to the tiny murder suspects. To prepare, the songwriters listened to Streep’s previous vocal performances to get a sense of her range.“It’s always nice when you know who you’re writing for because you can sort of tailor something to play to someone’s strengths,” Bareilles said. They emerged with a lovely ballad in which Streep croons in harmony with her fellow cast member Ashley Park, another Broadway veteran (“Mean Girls”).Streep, however, said she had been intimidated by the challenging melody. On the day of the recording session, she said, she had a “sort of a mental breakdown” after having to prep in only two days and being faced with new orchestration and a group of about 20 people gathered to hear her sing.“I really felt a responsibility to the music and to the song, which is a beautiful song, and I felt observed,” she said, adding that she “basically pulled a tiny diva move and said, ‘I can’t work like this’ or something.” (She laughed and then noted: “Oh god, that will be horrible unless you put it in all caps in print.”)There’s a burden to the expectation that comes with being Meryl Streep. “I just feel like sometimes the Meryl Streep of it all walks in like this ship, and everybody thinks, ‘Oh we’re going to watch the launch.’ And I think, ‘Oh yeah, you’re going to see the Titanic go down,’” she said.Her collaborators sang her praises.“It’s quite beautiful to witness after all of the laudatory things that have come her way, justifiably so, to watch her be nervous and to watch her be unsure,” Hoffman said.And Streep, of course, nailed it.“There was so much tenderness in her vulnerability,” Bareilles said. “She let that speak through her singing.”Short’s character, Oliver, tries to salvage his Broadway play by turning it into a musical, “Death Rattle Dazzle,” about whether infant triplets could have murdered their mother.Patrick Harbron/HuluThe world of backstage drama was, of course, familiar for the central trio. Short got his start in the 1972 Toronto production of “Godspell.” Martin has written two Broadway productions: the play “Meteor Shower” and the musical “Bright Star.” Gomez is the only one of them without Broadway experience, but she has toured as a pop star.“All three of us know show business and, I’d say, the stage world so well,” Martin said on a video call with Short and Gomez. “We draw upon a lot of memories: You know, the volatile director, the sensitive actor. And we don’t have to exaggerate to do it because we all have been there.”Still, Streep’s presence can be daunting for even the most seasoned performer, including Short.“I’m old and I’ve done this a long time,” he said. “And I’m driving to work the first day to work with Meryl, who I’ve known socially through the years but never worked with, and I found myself for first time in a long while going, Gee, I’m a little bit nervous.” During a pause in filming, Short was surprised to learn she had similar jitters.Selena Gomez was also star struck. “I never in a million years thought I would get to work with Meryl Streep,” she said. Streep’s performance, she added, made her cry. Alas, despite her other career as a pop recording artist, Gomez does not have a song in the onscreen musical.“I’m a terrible singer,” Martin said. “Selena should have a song, but her character is not in show business.” (Gomez does perform a quick Fosse-inspired dance number in a dream sequence.)During filming of the stage performances, which were shot at the United Palace in Washington Heights, Streep took up residence in the audience. Specifically, she wanted to watch Martin do his big tongue-twister number, “Which of the Pickwick Triplets Did It?”“We had a green room we could go to and sit around and bitch, but nobody went,” Streep said. “Everybody sat up there and watched him over and over and over. It was just divine.”So did the experience cure Streep’s malaise?It did, indeed, she said.“They go into everything on this show with this kind of 1940s cockeyed optimism,” she said. “And it was so lovely to be in that world.” More

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    ‘Toros’ Review: Why Are We Still Friends?

    Old relationships bend, then break, in Danny Tejera’s finely detailed character study of languishing jet-set twentysomethings.We all know this guy, or a version of him, anyway: smug, entitled, yet always somehow kept around. He cares only about his interests, his opinions on them, and does not welcome interruptions.Danny Tejera’s “Toros,” a fine character study which opened Tuesday night in an exquisitely performed Second Stage Theater production, asks us to spend 90 minutes in the presence of such a jerk — in this case, a Spanish-American wannabe DJ named Juan, played by Juan Castano. Thanks to Castano’s sharp, unselfconscious acting, we want to lean in to see what makes him tick. And we’re led to reflect, across a series of seemingly low-stakes hangouts in Juan’s parent’s garage, on how such behavior can poison longstanding relationships.Juan’s most significant relationship is with Toro (Abubakr Ali, with relentless charm and pathos), a Palestinian childhood acquaintance recently returned from a burnout stint at a high-paying job in New York. He now works, with a humble shrug, for Juan’s shady businessman father in Madrid, where the story takes place. Uncool but genuine, and with over-gelled hair, Toro punctuates his sentences with self-effacing scoffs.Through Juan’s machinations, the two are in quasi-competition over Andrea (the actor b; cool, calm, collected), a Mexican kindergarten teacher who, perpetually rolling a spliff, seems like she might rather be at home. Having met at a well-to-do American grade school, Andrea, Toro and Juan have that same vague air of over-traveled, under-cultured ennui only the jet set lifestyle could produce, and Tejera’s characterization locates the poignancy behind their displacement.Over the course of three increasingly tense weekends, the 20-somethings listen to Juan yell at his parents about his leaky bathroom over the EDM he blasts in their garage (Arnulfo Maldonado did the set) while they figure out the night’s next move. Toro and Andrea, effectively the heart of the show, must also navigate their host’s mercurial temper. All the while, Juan’s aging dog, Tica (Frank Wood, a marvel of physical acting), pants uncomfortably on the floor, too tired to wag her tongue.Tejera’s play, light on plot, rests on unraveling the uneasy dynamic between the three, and on the meticulousness with which the playwright renders the petty signifiers in their world. The Red Sox hoodie-wearing Juan, for example, at one point mentions, not without jealousy, Toro’s Georgetown education.These acute character details create a rich triptych of the ails of a social milieu that’s precise in stroke, impressionistic in structure. The specificities are held nimbly together by Gaye Taylor Upchurch’s direction, which knows when to breathe theatrical life into Tejera’s script — as in an uncomfortable, choreographed, sort-of sex scene — and when to let the air in its uncomfortable, often loaded conversations sputter out.Here, Upchurch has pushed the actors toward a strong self-awareness of their physical presence. While their comings and goings flow naturally, most everyone seems to be hyper-conscious of where they stand — within the room, with each other, and in life. Soon, you begin to wonder where you fit in. Or if, like Juan, you don’t care to think.TorosThrough Aug. 13 at the McGinn/Cazale Theater, Manhattan; 2st.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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    Amid the Mountains, They Can Be ‘Open Without Being Judged’

    In a cabin in the Rocky Mountains, a murmur began to build like the jungle cacophony it was intended to mimic. It was the final afternoon of the four-day Camp Realize Your Beauty, and the nine campers were repeating the social media and popular culture messages about perfection that they felt bombarded by in their daily lives.Their words would ring familiar to anyone who has ever felt the pinch of culturally lauded beauty standards: “Thigh gaps.” “Hourglass figure.” “No acne.” “Pores.” “No body hair.”A video helped explain the deceptive nature of photoshopping, which is widespread in images on social media.Starr Kirkland, an actor, teacher and longtime Realize Your Beauty facilitator, reminded the campers to keep repeating their phrase as the group’s chant of shoddy messaging crescendoed. The soundscape would be part of a devised video piece that was shared with their families after the weekend-long camp, which ran July 27-30. “We’re all going to say our themes at the same time,” another counselor told them. “Why? To create that overwhelming feeling.”The overload of images and muddy information that kids and adolescents receive about their bodies, particularly from social media, was among the reasons Stacey Lorin Merkl said she created Realize Your Beauty, a nonprofit based in New York City, in 2010. The goal: to blend theater, traditional camp offerings and empowerment workshops to help the children build self-esteem. In 2016, she started the theater-arts camp where “self-esteem takes center stage” (the organization’s tagline) at the Y.M.C.A. of the Rockies in Colorado, partly because that’s where she grew up, where she studied acting (at the University of Northern Colorado) and where her parents still reside. It’s also stunning.The campers were encouraged to “embrace the cringe” and to make new friends.Shelby Knowles for The New York TimesRealize Your Beauty isn’t packed with aspiring Audra McDonalds, Billy Porters and Sutton Fosters. At least not exclusively. “It’s not theater kids, necessarily,” Merkl said over coffee a few days before camp began. “Some of the kids love theater. Some of them are maybe mildly interested. Some of them are totally new to the theater, but their parents think that they could benefit from this. We are doing theater, but this is not a camp for them to come and learn Shakespeare.”Elise Arndt, a veteran theater camp counselor who flew in from Orange County, Calif., said: “Not all of them are going to be gung-ho theater people. But there’s something about it that intrigues them.” Arndt and Kirkland joined Realize Your Beauty early on, performing in the workshops and plays about body positivity and eating disorder awareness that the organization takes to schools in New York City, as well as to the Girl Scouts of America.Improvised games not only helped the campers and counselors warm up for activities but also reiterated that they are in a safe and playful space to be themselves.At the camp, the voice work, breathing exercises and improvisation games Arndt leads with — staples at many performing arts sleepaway camps — are tools for erecting safe and playful spaces for the campers to be themselves, even if they are still figuring out just who that person might be.On the first day, Kirkland, who proved to be something of a joy whisperer, advised them to “embrace the cringe,” to make new friends, to form “silly-ships.” Sitting in a circle, the campers, all from Colorado this year, shared their takeaways from the first acting exercises — which included an improvised bit in which a spoiling piece of sushi at a bus stop asked a woman to give up her seat.Time was set aside each day for them to write in their journals.“Even if it makes me feel a little silly, it makes other people laugh,” said Bella, 11.Emma, 10, one half of that maki roll, said, “I learned that we could pretend to be anything, even a piece of sushi.” And the shy Anna, 12, who had been encouraged by Riley, 14, and Bella, said in the quietest of voices: “I learned that it’s good to make new friends.”And even in a space where body positivity is the aim and self-kindness the mantra, hiccups can occur. For a breath-work exercise, Arndt asked the campers to lie down on their backs. “I feel fat laying down,” said Ava, 14, resting on the cabin’s carpeted floor.Not missing a beat, Arndt responded: “You do not look fat laying down. That is not Realize Your Beauty, right?”Warm-up drills included a series of games and skits. “We are doing theater, but this is not a camp for them to come and learn Shakespeare,” said Stacey Lorin Merkl, the camp’s founder and executive director.Shelby Knowles for The New York Times“You look like a person laying down,” a fellow camper added.“Take a big inhale through your stomach,” Arndt said, returning to the breathing. “All bodies are beautiful. Also, we literally made up fat. We made it up as a human race. Take a big inhale, take a big exhale.”Instead of putting on a show for the parents at the weekend’s conclusion, the campers and the staff worked on a video piece composed of journal entries, artwork and, of course, a song: This year’s was Miley Cyrus’s empowerment ballad “The Climb.” (“The struggles I’m facing/The chances I’m taking/Sometimes might knock me down, but/No, I’m not breaking,” the song goes.) They needed those big breaths.During a nature walk, the kids gathered materials for self-portraits.After dinner, the sisters Mia and Macie sat at a table, sharing impressions about the camp.“I always come back from camp just happy, unlike school,” said Mia, 14, who sometimes appeared to be hiding behind her long, straightened hair. This was her second year at Realize Your Beauty. “I just think that this camp is very fun — and I love meeting new people — but I think it’s also a camp where you could come, and you could be very open without being judged.”Teary goodbyes at the weekend’s end.Shelby Knowles for The New York TimesMacie, 10, boasting an Afro and talking in a high-pitched chirp, chimed in with an idea. “I think that there should be camp for the younger kids like this. Because when you have an open space like this when you’re younger,” she said, “you probably won’t be as mean as most people.”Over the span of the weekend, but even hour by hour, came hints of new self-awareness, arcs of subtle personal triumph. “I feel like the best part of the experience is definitely from the campers themselves,” said the first-time counselor June Dempsey, a 16-year-old theater kid and ballet dancer. “I’m loving watching their growth, and I’m already seeing it. People are building confidence.”The campers share cabins at the Y.M.C.A. of the Rockies in Estes Park, Colo.Among the teary goodbyes, one stood out. “Anna came up to me to say goodbye. And as soon as she came up, she just burst into tears,” Kirkland, tearing up, recalled during a video call after returning to her home in San Diego.“It just felt really beautiful,” she continued. “Not only that we were having that moment together, but that she had gotten to the place where she felt vulnerable enough that we could have that moment together, because that’s not anything she would have ever done when we started.” More

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    Can You Find These 13 Hidden Crime and Mystery Titles?

    “Well, the body in the library downstairs isn’t even tagged yet,” said the detective, absent-mindedly twisting the moonstone ring on her finger and trying to recall any relevant case histories involving multiple museum homicides.“I’d sure say someone acted with malice here,” said the police officer, eyeing the shadow of the man slumped under a Dutch still life of a fruit bowl. Art-wise, the floor was rapidly becoming a study in scarlet.“I’ll never get over how people really go to dark places when no one is watching,” sighed the detective. “Call the coroner and I’ll get the guest list from tonight’s benefit.”“Hey, look at the press pass on the vic,” said the policeman. “I’d say this is a deadly inside scoop.”“Well, the body in the library downstairs isn’t even tagged yet,” said the detective, absent-mindedly twisting the moonstone ring on her finger and trying to recall any relevant case histories involving multiple museum homicides.“I’d sure say someone acted with malice here,” said the police officer, eyeing the shadow of the man slumped under a Dutch still life of a fruit bowl. Art-wise, the floor was rapidly becoming a study in scarlet.“I’ll never get over how people really go to dark places when no one is watching,” sighed the detective. “Call the coroner and I’ll get the guest list from tonight’s benefit.”“Hey, look at the press pass on the vic,” said the policeman. “I’d say this is a deadly inside scoop.”“Well, the body in the library downstairs isn’t even tagged yet,” said the detective, absent-mindedly twisting the moonstone ring on her finger and trying to recall any relevant case histories involving multiple museum homicides.“I’d sure say someone acted with malice here,” said the police officer, eyeing the shadow of the man slumped under a Dutch still life of a fruit bowl. Art-wise, the floor was rapidly becoming a study in scarlet.“I’ll never get over how people really go to dark places when no one is watching,” sighed the detective. “Call the coroner and I’ll get the guest list from tonight’s benefit.”“Hey, look at the press pass on the vic,” said the policeman. “I’d say this is a deadly inside scoop.” More