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

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

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      Robert Downey Jr. Is a Novelist With a Novel Muse in ‘McNeal’

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      The “Oppenheimer” star makes his Broadway debut in Ayad Akhtar’s timely new play about a literary lion who gets assistance from A.I.The Vivian Beaumont Theater has, over the years, been memorably transformed into many specific, even exotic, locales: a Maine carousel, a Thai palace, a South Pacific Seabee base. But never has it looked more exotically nowhere than it does right now, as the setting for Ayad Akhtar’s “McNeal,” a thought experiment about art and A.I. With its softly rounded edges, cool colors and shifting screens, the sleek, vast space is as much an Apple store as a stage.That’s only fitting for a story, set in “the very near future,” in which computer-mediated interactions — predictive chatbots, large language models, generative intelligence — are pitted against their analog forebears. What creative opportunities does such technology afford the artist? What human opportunities does it squander? Forget the sword: It’s the pen vs. the pixel.I’m afraid, alas, the pixel wins, because the play, which opened on Monday, in a stylish Lincoln Center Theater production directed by Bartlett Sher, works only as provocation. Timely but turgid, it rarely rises to drama; in a neat recapitulation of current fears about technology, its humans, hardly credible as such, have been almost entirely replaced by ideas.Certainly Jacob McNeal, played by the formidable Robert Downey Jr., is more a data set than a character. A manly, hard-driving literary novelist of the old school, like Saul Bellow or Philip Roth, he is not at all the magnetic and personable man Akhtar describes in the script; rather, he is whiny, entitled and fatuous. (“At my simple best, I’m a poet,” he says.) About the only time he engages instead of repels is when, in the amusing opening scene, as his doctor (Ruthie Ann Miles) prepares to deliver bad news, he fails to get ChatGPT to tell him his chances of winning the Nobel Prize.“I hope this was helpful,” the bot types.“It was not, you soulless, silicon suck-up,” he replies.We are meant to understand that McNeal is a man who wears his awfulness, in this case his vanity, as an adorable idiosyncrasy, as if it were a feathered hat. He flirts and philanders with equal obliviousness to moral implications. He aggressively asserts his anti-woke bona fides. While being interviewed by a New York Times journalist, who is Black, he asks if she was a “diversity hire.” And when she fails to take the bait, he adds, as a man of his sophistication would know enough not to, “Did I say something wrong?”Downey and Andrea Martin, who portrays a literary agent, in the new play by Ayad Akhtar.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Gavin Creel, Tony-Winning Musical Theater Actor, Dies at 48

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      He won the award playing a Yonkers feed store clerk in “Hello, Dolly!” and was also nominated for roles in “Thoroughly Modern Millie” and “Hair.”Gavin Creel, a sly and charming musical theater actor who won a Tony Award as a wide-eyed adventure seeker in “Hello, Dolly!” and an Olivier Award as a preening missionary in “The Book of Mormon,” died on Monday at his home in Manhattan. He was 48.His death was confirmed by his partner, Alex Temple Ward, via a publicist, Matt Polk. The cause was metastatic melanotic peripheral nerve sheath sarcoma, a rare form of cancer, which Mr. Creel learned he had in July.Mr. Creel was a well-liked member of the New York theater community whose death comes as a shock, given his age. He had been performing on Broadway for two decades, mostly in starring roles, and just last winter his physical and vocal agility, as well as his charisma and curiosity, were on display in a memoiristic show he wrote and performed Off Broadway called “Walk on Through: Confessions of a Museum Novice,” about learning to love the Metropolitan Museum of Art.Mr. Creel during his Broadway debut in 2002 when he played Jimmy Smith in “Thoroughly Modern Millie” opposite Sutton Foster as Millie Dillmount.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesA superior singer with a sunny tenor, Mr. Creel made his Broadway debut and received his first Tony nomination in 2002 as the suave salesman Jimmy Smith in the original production of “Thoroughly Modern Millie,” starring opposite Sutton Foster, who played the title character, a spunky social climber named Millie Dillmount.He went on to find success in a string of Broadway revivals, playing the straight son of a gay couple in “La Cage aux Folles” (which opened in 2004); the leader of a tribe of hippies in “Hair” (2009); a womanizing clerk in “She Loves Me” (2016); a callow clerk in “Hello, Dolly!” (2017); and both a prince and a wolf in “Into the Woods” (2022).We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Disoriented in America: Two Political Plays Reflect a Changed Country

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      The Off Broadway plays “Fatherland” and “Blood of the Lamb” explore the grief, anger and fear of no longer recognizing the country you love.When, in the course of human events, the political bands that have connected a people appear to be dissolving rapidly, it’s fair to ask: Who in their right mind would want to revisit the chaos of Jan. 6, 2021, in the form of a play?I wouldn’t have thought that I did. That history is too recent, too fraught, too unresolved. Yet the theater has always been a place in which to search the dark corners of a nation’s soul, and to sit with grief.That emotion figures palpably in “Fatherland,” a finely calibrated, surprisingly affecting new work of verbatim theater at New York City Center Stage II. It tells the true story of Guy Wesley Reffitt, a middle-aged rioter from a Dallas suburb who was sent to prison for his role in the Capitol attack, and his son, Jackson, who was an 18-year-old high schooler when he turned his father in to the F.B.I., and just 19 when he testified against him.Conceived and directed by Stephen Sachs for the Los Angeles-based Fountain Theater, where the play was staged earlier this year, it is on one level about the profound grief of no longer recognizing a parent you love, or a child you raised. But like another new Off Broadway drama — Arlene Hutton’s “Blood of the Lamb,” more on which below — “Fatherland” is also about the grief and anger, the fear and disorientation, of no longer recognizing your own country.Using text from the transcript of the elder Reffitt’s 2022 trial, and other publicly available sources, the play calls its central characters simply Father (Ron Bottitta) and Son (an exquisitely restrained Patrick Keleher). Their clash, for all its 21st-century Americanness, is as primal as any parent-child conflict from ancient Greek drama, or from Shakespeare.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: ‘The Hills of California,’ Alive With the Sound of Music

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      In Jez Butterworth’s compelling new play, four girls trained to sing close harmony wind up as acrimonious adults.Two sounds greet you at the start of “The Hills of California,” Jez Butterworth’s relentlessly entertaining new play: the crashing of waves on the beaches of Blackpool and the tinkling of a tinny piano being tuned.Both are plot points: The story concerns a musical family operating a rundown resort on the west coast of England. “Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy,” “It Never Entered My Mind,” “When I Fall in Love” and “Dream a Little Dream of Me” are among the marvelous oldies you’ll hear sung during the course of the action.But the crashing and tuning are thematic points, too. Though frequently funny and, even at nearly three hours, swift, “The Hills of California,” which opened on Sunday at the Broadhurst Theater, drops you deep into the devastations of time and lifts you gently into the consolations of song.It does so within a familiar stage format — familiar in life, alas, as well: the dying-parent drama. In 1976, the four Webb sisters reunite at the Seaview Luxury Guesthouse (which is neither luxurious nor within sight of the sea) as their mother, Veronica, who ran the place for decades, under several desperate versions of the name, expires upstairs.Jillian, the youngest, has failed to thrive; she’s a 32-year-old virgin who lives at home, chatters nervously and secretly smokes. The others have run as far from Blackpool as they could: Ruby and Gloria into unhappy marriages hours away; Joan, the oldest, toward a dream of fame in California. Whether she has achieved that dream is an open question; she has not been back home since she left at 15, and only Jillian believes she will return even now.All this is efficiently established in the play’s opening scene, which is so sharply and subtly directed by Sam Mendes, and so vividly performed by the cast, you hardly notice all the information you’re being fed: tics, conflicts, personalities, pecking order. Then, just as you’ve finally attached everyone’s names to their faces, Butterworth rewinds to 1955, when the sisters, played by a new set of actors, are teenagers and Veronica is a terror.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Laura Donnelly, ‘Hills of California’ Star, Is Not Some Delicate Flower

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      But she did “burst into tears” reading Jez Butterworth’s rewrite of his new Broadway play, which left her with 10 days “to create an entirely new character.”Most plays that transfer to New York from London arrive in close to their original form. There might be small changes to the text, to make particular lines comprehensible to American ears, but usually not much more than that.Laura Donnelly, the star of Jez Butterworth’s new play, “The Hills of California,” knew that the playwright had been planning rewrites since early in the London run, which stretched from January to June this year. The current Broadway engagement at the Broadhurst Theater would give Butterworth the chance.“He was really excited about that,” Donnelly, 42, said over coffee on a recent morning in Manhattan, her dark hair lightened, permed and cut in a ’70s style for the play. “He kept referring to it as like, ‘little bits here and there,’ and I was like, ‘OK, cool. Yep, no problem.’ I think this is also what he told Sam [Mendes], our director, and told our producers. So they scheduled in two weeks of rehearsals.”From left, Leanne Best, Helena Wilson, Donnelly and Ophelia Lovibond as singing sisters in the Broadway production of “The Hills of California.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhat Butterworth, Donnelly’s partner of nearly a dozen years, had actually ended up doing was a major rewrite of the third act — an overhaul that alters the substance, plot and even meaning of the play.From the start, Donnelly has portrayed two characters in “The Hills of California”: Veronica Webb, a guesthouse owner in Blackpool, England, in 1955, who is rigorously training her four adolescent daughters to become an American-style girl group; and Joan, her estranged and longed-for favorite child, who returns home at last in 1976, in Act III. But the Joan of the West End script was significantly different from the Joan of the Broadway script.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Maggie Smith, Grande Dame of Stage and Screen, Dies at 89

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      She earned an extraordinary array of awards, from Oscars to Emmys to a Tony, but she could still go almost everywhere unrecognized. Then came “Downton Abbey.”Maggie Smith, one of the finest British stage and screen actors of her generation, whose award-winning roles ranged from a freethinking Scottish schoolteacher in “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” to the acid-tongued dowager countess on “Downton Abbey,” died on Friday in London. She was 89.Her death, in a hospital, was announced by her family in a statement issued by a publicist. It did not specify the cause of death.American moviegoers barely knew Ms. Smith (now Dame Maggie to her countrymen) when she starred in “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” (1969), about a teacher at a girls’ school in the 1930s who dared to have provocative views — and a love life. Vincent Canby’s review in The New York Times described her performance as “a staggering amalgam of counterpointed moods, switches in voice levels and obliquely stated emotions, all of which are precisely right.” It brought her the Academy Award for best actress.She won a second Oscar, for best supporting actress, for “California Suite” (1978), based on Neil Simon’s stage comedy. Her character, a British actress attending the Oscars with her bisexual husband (Michael Caine), has a disappointing evening at the ceremony and a bittersweet night in bed.In real life, prizes had begun coming Ms. Smith’s way in 1962, when she won her first Evening Standard Theater Award. By the turn of the millennium, she had the two Oscars, a Tony, two Golden Globes, half a dozen BAFTAs (British Academy of Film and Television Awards) and scores of nominations. Yet she could go almost anywhere unrecognized.Until “Downton Abbey.”Ms. Smith on the set of the 1969 film “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.” She won an Academy Award for best actress for the performance.Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group, via Getty Images

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      in Theater

      Maggie Smith Was Imperious in the Most Delightful Way

      by

      Throughout her career and on “Downton Abbey,” she perfected the role of the commanding Englishwoman with an arrow-sharp wit.“Oh for heaven’s sake!” Maggie Smith said in a 2015 interview, waving her hands vigorously in front of her face at the suggestion that she was a “national treasure.”But Smith, who died on Friday at 89, was that very thing, an actor who embodied a quintessentially British character: the imperious, commanding woman, be it an aristocrat or a schoolteacher, who smites the less certain or socially secure with her arrow-sharp wit and finely honed disdain, though delivered in suitably plummy tones.While she worked steadily in theater from the start of her acting career in the 1950s, Smith didn’t become famous until she won an Oscar for her performance in the 1969 film “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.” Early on, she later recalled, she had signed a contract with a film company and received a message from the studio publicity department: “Your fan mail total for this month is nil.”Smith didn’t become famous until she won an Oscar for her performance in the 1969 film “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.” 20th Century Fox/Getty ImagesEven after her breakout performance, her fame was mostly among theater and film cognoscenti, who adored her expressive physicality, brilliant comic timing and subtly moving revelations of character. In 1990, Smith was made a dame of the British Empire. But it wasn’t until Smith was in her 60s, cast as Minerva McGonagall in the “Harry Potter” movies, then in 2010 as Violet Crawley, dowager countess of Grantham, in the “Downton Abbey” television series, that she achieved global fame.“What is a … weekend?” the countess asked in a tone that exquisitely mixed contempt with a soupçon of interest, in one of the first episodes of the show. The line (all credit to the show’s creator, Julian Fellowes) and her delivery summed up her appeal to the enormous “Downton” audience, who couldn’t get enough of Smith’s witty, acerbic character.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More