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

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

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

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      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?

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      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’

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      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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      Lifted by Lea Michele, ‘Funny Girl’ Recoups on Broadway

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      The show, which opened in the spring of 2022, has had a remarkable box office turnaround after Michele replaced its original star.The Broadway revival of “Funny Girl” starring Lea Michele is now officially a hit: It has recouped its capitalization costs, completing a remarkable box office turnaround of the sort rarely seen in the commercial theater.The show’s lead producers, Sonia Friedman, Scott Landis and David Babani, announced on Monday that the production had made back the $16.5 million it cost to mount. That milestone not only gives the production bragging rights, but also means that “Funny Girl” can generate a profit during the last few weeks of its run, which ends on Sept. 3.Only a handful of Broadway productions have announced the recoupment of their capitalization costs since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, as higher expenses and smaller audiences have made the always challenging economics of Broadway even more difficult.“Funny Girl,” though, is an especially unusual case: The production — the first revival of a show that had long seemed impossible to revive because of the long shadow of its original star, Barbra Streisand — opened at the August Wilson Theater in April 2022 with Beanie Feldstein in the title role. Critics were underwhelmed; the show won no Tony Awards (it was only nominated for one); and by summer its sales had drooped.The producers replaced Feldstein with Michele, generating an avalanche of press coverage (Michele was a star of “Glee,” and her character had starred in a fictional revival of “Funny Girl”) and rapturous reviews (in The Los Angeles Times, Charles McNulty called Michele’s performance “one of the top five musical theater performances I’ve seen in my lifetime”). Ticket sales soared (as did ticket prices — the top price at the box office rose to $599 last Christmas), and over time the production made enough money to recover its development costs. Michele, whose reputation had been tarnished by allegations that she had behaved poorly to co-workers on “Glee,” worked tirelessly to transform the way people saw both her and “Funny Girl,” and became the toast of the town.Among the other Broadway shows that have opened since the pandemic shutdown and announced recoupment are “Six,” a pop musical about the wives of King Henry VIII; “MJ,” the Michael Jackson biomusical; and “Prima Facie,” a one-woman play about sexual assault that starred Jodie Comer. Also, a handful of shows that opened before the pandemic have recouped since theaters reopened, including “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” and “Moulin Rouge!” Not all shows announce recoupment, and it is likely that a few other shows have quietly done so in recent months.A “Funny Girl” tour is scheduled to start next month in Providence, R.I., starring Katerina McCrimmon. More

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      Book Review: ‘August Wilson: A Life,’ by Patti Hartigan

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      The first major biography of the playwright recounts his life and boundless vision.AUGUST WILSON: A Life, by Patti HartiganIn 1986, David Mamet published his best book, a slim and semi-hardboiled treatise on theater and life titled “Writing in Restaurants.” This was decades before he became “the Kanye West of American letters,” as The Forward put it last year. Alas, the book was only vaguely about restaurants.Mamet’s title came back to me while I was reading Patti Hartigan’s biography of another essential American playwright, August Wilson. Wilson, who died in 2005, spent so much time lingering in diners that “Writing in Restaurants” is a plausible alternative subtitle for Hartigan’s “August Wilson: A Life.”Wilson was a large, bearded man, often in tweeds and a pageboy cap. He’d sit in the back with a cup of coffee and an overflowing ashtray. (He smoked five packs a day and didn’t pause while in the shower.) He’d write on napkins or receipts, whatever was handy.He wrote one early play, “Jitney,” in an Arthur Treacher’s Fish & Chips. As his fame grew, he’d find a place in each city where his plays were staged. He’d call this joint “the Spot.” In New York City, he liked the seedy charm of the Hotel Edison’s coffee shop, known to regulars as the Polish Tea Room. In Boston, it was Ann’s Cafeteria. In Seattle, Caffe Ladro. He’d bring newspapers, and sometimes a friend. Over breakfast he’d hold court for four or five hours at a time. It was his daily slice of experimental theater.Wilson was a raconteur, with an autodidact’s darting curiosity. He was born in Pittsburgh in 1945, to a single Black mother who raised him and his siblings largely on welfare checks. He mined that city, especially its historically African American Hill District, as if it were coal; he was tapping a seam. The family’s first house had no hot water and an outhouse in the backyard. Wilson dropped out of high school and had a brief stint in the Army. He educated himself in Pittsburgh’s libraries the way Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote that he did at Howard University: “three call slips at a time.”He thought he might be a poet. His early verse was ornate and indebted to Dylan Thomas; it made him a figure of gentle derision. He discovered Bessie Smith and the blues, and he fell sideways into theater. Amiri Baraka was a key influence; the poet, playwright and activist had come to Pittsburgh in 1968, at the height of the Black Power movement, and delivered a galvanizing speech. Wilson was 23 at the time.Baraka had founded the Black Arts Repertory Theater/School in Harlem in 1965. Wilson and his arts-world friends decided to start their own theater, which they called Black Horizons. No one volunteered to lead it, and Wilson was chosen by default. Material was needed, and Wilson began to write it. The words were simply there; the African American voices of an entire city came pouring out of him. His was a self-replenishing vision.This is the first major biography of Wilson, whose 10-play Century Cycle (also called the Pittsburgh Cycle) made him arguably the most important and successful playwright of the late 20th century. These plays, one for each decade of the 1900s, include “Fences” and “The Piano Lesson,” both of which won Pulitzer Prizes, as well as “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” and what might be his most electric play, “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.”“Fences” and “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” became films starring, respectively, Denzel Washington and Viola Davis, and Davis and Chadwick Boseman. His plays provided career-boosting roles to Angela Bassett, Delroy Lindo and Samuel L. Jackson, among many others. They luxuriated in his language. He had a special gift for lowlife dialogue and camaraderie — the cries of characters craving to be understood.Hartigan is a former Boston Globe theater critic. Her book is an achievement: It’s solid and well reported. But it’s dutiful. It lacks ebullience and critical insight. The writing is slack and, by the second half, the clichés are falling so heavily you need a hat. A play is “a diamond in the rough” or “a well-oiled machine.” An event is, to grab just one example, “as likely as snow in July.”Yet Wilson’s story carries you along. Hartigan describes the then-novel system that Wilson and his most important director, Lloyd Richards, developed to nurture his plays. Before arriving in New York, they would open at a string of nonprofit regional theaters, in Minneapolis, Chicago, Seattle and elsewhere, allowing Wilson to make cuts (his early drafts tended to be unwieldy) and hone his material.Frank Rich, then the theater critic for The New York Times, was an essential early champion. This biography’s best set piece might be the lead-up to a public debate in the winter of 1997 at Manhattan’s Town Hall, between Wilson and a less generous critic, Robert Brustein of The New Republic. (Standing outside the theater, Henry Louis Gates Jr. called it the “Thrilla in Manila.”) The evening was moderated by Anna Deavere Smith. Even before the event, Wilson and Brustein had tangled over, among other things, color-blind casting, which Wilson had declared “an insult to our intelligence.” He thought developing Black playwrights was more important. Patti HartiganMarisa IhWilson never got over certain childhood racial slights. In one Pittsburgh store, only white shoppers received their purchases in paper bags. For the rest of his life, Wilson asked for anything he bought to be placed in one. He had a temper. He hated it when a waiter would say something like, “What’ll you have, boys?” He was light-skinned. His absent father was a white man. He disliked having this fact mentioned.Wilson was married three times and had two daughters. He was not an attentive father or husband; his work came first. His second daughter grew up referring to him as “the slippery guy.” He was also, Hartigan writes, a lifelong womanizer, a sexual locavore.Critics have noted the relative lack of strong women’s roles in his work. Some other Black playwrights felt his overweening success left them in the shadows — that American culture had room for only one of them.This book couldn’t have been easy to write. Wilson tended to have three or four projects going at once: a play in New York, one in development somewhere, a third he was starting to write. Hartigan is adept at keeping the lines straight.Wilson argued with his directors, and often with his actors. He delivered rewrites up to the last minute. He procrastinated. Everyone was forced to live on what they called “August Wilson time.” He never learned to drive.Wilson mostly avoided Hollywood. He knew too many talents who disappeared there. He turned down an offer to write the film “Amistad” for Steven Spielberg. He was a complicated man and, even in an imperfect book, it’s a pleasure to make his company.AUGUST WILSON: A Life | By Patti Hartigan | Illustrated | 531 pp. | Simon & Schuster | $32.50 More

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      The Playwright Who Changed the Face of American Theater

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      Since 1965, the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, tucked away in the bucolic seaside town of Waterford, Conn., has lured theater professionals every summer for the National Playwrights Conference. Named for the Nobel Prize-winning playwright who spent his childhood summers nearby, the O’Neill was initially informal and heady, but Lloyd Richards, who directed the 1959 Broadway production of Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun,” brought a sense of gravitas when he became artistic director in 1969.August Wilson first arrived at the O’Neill in 1982 with “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.” At 37, he was older than the others, but he presented himself as a neophyte who worked as a short-order cook. He had applied five times — and was rejected five times — but finally got his chance with “Ma Rainey.”During Richards’s era, the O’Neill became a haven for writers to test their work outside the commercial pressure of Broadway. Yet it was also a clubby place, with a regular company of actors and directors. Wilson didn’t immediately fit in, but by the end of the summer, he had developed an esprit de corps with his fellow playwrights.The O’Neill was a place, Wilson once said, where “you can fail and your life won’t disappear.” Writers mattered. They stuck up for one another in the way that playwrights today have supported the writers’ strike in Hollywood. It was at the O’Neill, after all, that Wilson got his ticket to the world of professional theater. “Ma Rainey” opened on Broadway in 1984, and Wilson, who died in 2005 at 60, went on to write his series of 10 plays about the African American experience in the 20th century.In 1983, Wilson returned to the O’Neill with “Fences.” The story of that summer is recounted here in this excerpt from “August Wilson: A Life,” an upcoming biography by Patti Hartigan, a former theater critic for The Boston Globe.AUGUST WILSON WAS SETTLING IN to the life of an itinerant playwright. He had been invited back to the O’Neill for the 1983 National Playwrights Conference for a workshop of “Fences,” and this time, he knew what to expect at the preconference weekend. He had one goal before he got on the van to Waterford. He needed to stock up on scotch. When he arrived at the pickup location, he spotted someone he had never seen before. He seemed unfamiliar with the routine, with the same apprehension that Wilson had experienced the year before. He was James Yoshimura, a writer from Chicago who had attended the Yale School of Drama. After a brief introduction, Wilson told Yoshimura that they needed to get some liquid sustenance in order to make it through the long weekend. Yoshimura was up for the chase. They found a store, pooled their money, and bought a large bottle of scotch. By the time the van deposited them at the mansion, they were smashed. And they became fast friends.“Fences,” Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, arrived on Broadway in 1987 after premiering in 1985 at Yale Repertory Theater. Both productions starred, from left, Mary Alice, Ray Aranha and James Earl Jones.Ron ScherlLike Wilson, Yoshimura was raised Catholic and came from a large family. His parents converted when they were forced to live in an internment camp for Japanese Americans during World War II. “That does not work for birth control,” Yoshimura said. “I am the middle of 11 children.” His family was one of only three Asian families in a predominantly German American Catholic parish on the North Side of Chicago. “You are the other,” he said of his childhood. “August could empathize with that. He knew what the ‘other’ was. We shared this friendship. It wasn’t like we would discuss Catholicism. This was just how we grew up. We never felt part of the mainstream of the faith that we were baptized into.”During his first year at the O’Neill, Wilson was stunned to see all the theater people hugging one another, but now he was one of them. He took it upon himself to initiate his new friend to the summer camp experience. “The bottle of scotch made the preconference much better,” Yoshimura said. And they were willing to share. “We made a lot of friends.” Yoshimura needed liquid encouragement to get through the process of reading his play aloud before strangers. He was there with “Ohio Tip-Off,” a drama about seven athletes on a minor-league basketball team who are vying to make it to the N.B.A. The team has four Black players and three white players. Wilson did not question his new friend’s subject matter, but he did question the way he read his play for the group. “I read my play very badly, and he laughed aloud about how bad I was — while we were still sharing our scotch.” Wilson did not tell Yoshimura that he had been at the O’Neill the summer before (nor that he had become the controversial star after the Frank Rich [review disguised as a feature] ran in The New York Times, nor that he was in discussions about bringing “Ma Rainey” to Broadway). When Yoshimura found out, he asked Wilson about it. “He was humble. He didn’t want to talk about it.”Wilson, who later went on to make strong public statements about the need for a Black director to direct a film version of “Fences,” nurtured Yoshimura. He never suggested that Yoshimura should not be writing Black characters. His friend played basketball, and he was writing what he knew. “All of our discussions were about aesthetics,” Yoshimura said. “It was never a matter of color. He was like, ‘If you write it, you write it. If it doesn’t work, you gotta fix it.’” Wilson told other playwrights the same thing over the years. Laura Maria Censabella, who was also a jazz singer, came to the O’Neill with her play “Jazz Wives Jazz Lives.” The characters included Black jazz musicians that she based on her friends and colleagues in the jazz world. Some at the O’Neill questioned whether she, as a white woman, should write Black characters. Wilson defended her; she was writing from her own experience. Because of his support, the griping stopped.Wilson had different issues with “Fences.” It clocked in at more than four hours when Wilson read it at the preconference. “My impression was, this guy can write, but he hasn’t heard of the two-hour limit,” Yoshimura said. “It took two hours to get through the first act.”Yoshimura was the perfect partner for Wilson at the O’Neill, where, in addition to learning about playwriting, he enjoyed the college experience he had never had. The two bonded over sports. Wilson was still obsessed with the 1965 boxing showdown between Muhammad Ali and Sonny Liston. Ali unexpectedly knocked out Liston early in the first round, leading to suspicions that the fight was rigged. Wilson could dissect that match for hours, and Yoshimura was a willing audience.The Broadway revival of “Fences,” in 2010, featured Viola Davis, Denzel Washington and Stephen McKinley Henderson. They all went on to star in the 2016 film adaptation.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhen Yoshimura’s wife showed up to visit, Wilson made sure to teach their young son how to hit a baseball with a tree branch, a skill he had learned on the streets of Pittsburgh’s Hill District. They were improvising, onstage and off. This endearing friendship was formative for both men. Yoshimura had been told that he would succeed only if he wrote plays about Asian Americans, but Wilson assured him that was nonsense. Yoshimura tried to engage him on the subject of father-son relationships, since that is the foundation of “Fences.” Wilson, who was willing to talk about any subject for hours, shut down when asked about his father. Yoshimura intuited that his friend was “deeply wounded” and didn’t push the issue.Bill Partlan [the director of “Ma Rainey” the year before] was assigned to direct “Fences,” and Edith Oliver, the theater critic for The New Yorker, was the dramaturg. At the preconference, they both told Wilson that the play needed cuts. They made suggestions, but he said he wanted to see it first before excising any scenes or monologues. Wilson had never studied dramatic structure. He was learning fundamental rules such as the fact that an actor can’t be soaking wet in the rain at the end of one scene and then appear at the top of the next scene in fresh new clothing and dry hair.After the first performance, he stayed up all night and cut 45 minutes from the script. (Helen Hayes had been in the audience that night, and she left after the first act, reportedly saying, “I think I’ve had enough theater for one night.”) Wilson took out a long monologue about bones walking on water, a poetic piece of writing. Partlan told him to hold on to it. The monologue would be the foundation of a moving speech in “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.”“Fences” revolves around the tragic hero, Troy Maxson, a former slugger in the Negro Leagues who never got a chance to play in the Major Leagues because of the color of his skin. At its heart, the play is about the confrontation between Maxson and his son Cory, a theme that Wilson had explored in “Jitney!” as well. At the end of the play, Troy dies, and his brother, Gabriel, who was wounded in World War II and is mentally disabled with a metal plate in his head, wants to send his brother off to St. Peter in heaven. He blows his trumpet, but no sound comes out. The stage directions say it all. “He begins to howl in what is an attempt at song, or perhaps a song turning back into itself in an attempt at speech. He finishes his dance and the Gates of Heaven stand open as wide as God’s closet.” With that, Gabriel lightens up and says, “That’s the way that go.”On the second night of the performance at the O’Neill, the fog from the Atlantic Ocean rolled in at the end of the play. This was a common occurrence. Eugene O’Neill wrote about the fog in his masterpiece, “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” “How thick the fog is,” he wrote. “I can’t see the road. All the people in the world could pass by and I would never know.”At the O’Neill, the natural setting was magical. The weather changed just as Gabriel, played by Howard E. Rollins Jr., went to play his trumpet. “The fog came in, and the lights pierced through the fog,” Partlan said. “I sent Howard up the ramp that leads to the door in the barn to usher Troy into heaven. It was magic. I can still see and feel it today.”The wallop of that final scene became a sort of touchstone at the O’Neill. Other playwrights aspired to achieve that emotional depth. At the end of the preconference when Wilson first read his play, he and the playwright John Patrick Shanley got drunk together one night [a story that is recounted in Jeffrey Sweet’s “The O’Neill”]. Shanley said, “You son-of-a-bitch. You wrote that stage direction at the end of that play,” referring to Gabriel blowing the trumpet. “You son-of-a-bitch. Nobody can touch that.”A revival of “Fences” is running at Shakespeare and Company in Lenox, Mass., through Aug. 27. Hartigan will be there at the Aug. 12 matinee for a discussion about her book, which will be published by Simon & Schuster on Aug. 15. More