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      How ‘Operation Mincemeat’ Revealed a Family’s World War II Secrets

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      Descendants of characters in “Operation Mincemeat,” a hit British musical now in New York, have gotten more out of seeing it than a few catchy melodies.When William Leggatt was at work as a renewal energy developer a couple of summers ago, he received a bizarre email from a superfan of “Operation Mincemeat,” a British musical about a wacky World War II intelligence plot.As the show outlines, the operation involved British spies dressing a corpse as a military officer, stuffing a briefcase with fake letters implying an imminent invasion of Sardinia, and then dumping the corpse and documents at sea to be discovered by the Nazis.So the email contained a simple question: Was William a distant relative of Hester Leggatt, a prim secretary who appears in the musical and played a key role in the plot?The show’s superfans, who meet in an online forum and are known as Mincefluencers, believed that Hester was involved in writing fake love letters that officials planted on the body to help make the plot believable — and that she deserved to be publicly honored. But William Leggatt had no idea what the email was talking about.The cast members, from left, Claire-Marie Hall, Zoë Roberts, David Cumming, Natasha Hodgson and Jak Malone, during the curtain call last week at the Golden Theater in Manhattan.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesIt was only when he started talking to family members who were closer to the great-aunt and, later, reading a document sent by the Mincefluencers, that he realized they were right. In the end, he recalled in a recent interview, the musical “opened a whole side to my family I’d never known.”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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      George Clooney’s ‘Good Night, and Good Luck’ Sets Broadway Box Office Record

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      “Good Night, and Good Luck” grossed $3.3 million last week, breaking a record that was set earlier this month by Denzel Washington’s “Othello.”Broadway box office records are falling like dominoes this season as a handful of starry plays entice fans to pay sky-high ticket prices to see their favorite movie stars up close and emoting.“Good Night, and Good Luck,” a new play starring George Clooney, grossed $3.3 million last week, the most money a nonmusical play has ever made during a single week on Broadway, according to data released Tuesday by the Broadway League. And it did so with just a seven-performance week: It is still in previews, and not yet doing Broadway’s typical eight.It shattered the previous record, which was set just two weeks earlier by a new production of “Othello” starring Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal, which grossed $2.8 million in the week that ended March 9. (Before that, the record had been held by “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” which grossed $2.7 million during a holiday week in late 2023.)“Othello” still has higher ticket prices — its top seats were being sold on its website for $921, compared to $799 for “Good Night, and Good Luck” — but “Good Night, and Good Luck” is playing in a larger theater, so it is taking in more money overall.The average ticket price for “Othello” was $303.15 last week — down from previous weeks because of free seats for journalists attending press performances and guests attending opening night. The average price for “Good Night, and Good Luck” was $302.07. But “Good Night, and Good Luck,” which is adapted from the 2005 movie about the broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow, is playing in the 1,545-seat Winter Garden Theater, while “Othello” is in the 1,043-seat Ethel Barrymore.Broadway’s box office has traditionally been dominated by musicals, which tend to be more popular, to play longer, and to run in larger theaters than plays. The record for the most money made by a Broadway musical was set late last year, when “Wicked” grossed $5 million during a Christmas week when there were nine performances.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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      ‘Wine in the Wilderness’ Review: Beauty in Blackness

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      Written by Alice Childress in 1969, the play feels just as revelatory more than 50 years later in a new production from Classic Stage Company.The subject of the painting is stunning — a regal Black woman in tiger print, her Afro crowning her head like a dandelion. She basks in a halo of warm yellows and oranges that give her the appearance of a walking sunset, or a wild flame. She is the vision of “perfect Black womanhood,” according to the artist who painted her in “Wine in the Wilderness,” Classic Stage Company’s new production that opened Monday. This show, like the painting, is beautiful. It is also essential for the complexity beneath its surface.The creator of this perfect Black woman is Bill (Grantham Coleman), who’s working in his one-room apartment while outside the streets of Harlem are awake with riots. It’s the summer of 1964, and Bill is spending the riots painting when he gets an unwelcome visit by Oldtimer (a charming Milton Craig Nealy), who’s dropped by with some loot. Bill’s working on a triptych called “Wine in the Wilderness” for an upcoming exhibition. The first two parts — a painting of an angelic young Black girl and the second of “Mother Africa,” his perfect Black woman — are done. The final piece, he explains to Oldtimer, will be a painting of a “messed-up chick,” a Black woman who’s “ignorant, unfeminine, coarse, rude, vulgar.” He just hasn’t found his subject yet.Conveniently, Bill’s married neighbor-friends, Sonny-man (Brooks Brantly) and Cynthia (Lakisha May), are on their way to his place after some mid-riot drinks with the perfect model to complete his work. That would be the rambunctious Tommy (Olivia Washington), and Bill is pleased to discover that she’s exactly the kind of “messed-up chick” he needs to paint.Written in 1969 by Alice Childress, one of the great but underappreciated Black playwrights, “Wine in the Wilderness” is set over the course of just a few hours, from the evening riots into the morning. It’s a lean parable (the production runs a fleet 85 minutes) about what progress truly looks like — and where the seeds of change can begin — in a revolution.We’re fortunate to be in the midst of a rediscovery of Childress’s work, including the recent Broadway production of “Trouble in Mind” and an Off Broadway production of “Wedding Band.” “Wine in the Wilderness,” like Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s equally compelling “Purpose,” depicts something we don’t see often enough onstage: cross sections of gender, class and sexuality within the Black experience. It reveals the conflicting values and complex expectations that must come with any well-drawn portrait of a community of people.Nealy, left, and Coleman. “Wine in the Wilderness” takes place over a few hours in 1964.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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      The Price of a Show

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      Tickets for the hottest Broadway plays are now out of reach for many. There’s a starry production of “Othello” opening on Broadway tonight. And if you’re among the many people who really, really want to see Denzel Washington as a jealous general, opposite Jake Gyllenhaal as a scheming Iago, it’s going to cost you: Most of the center orchestra seats, as well as a few rows in the mezzanine, are being sold for $921 apiece.The high prices for this Shakespeare classic are setting records. During its second week of previews, “Othello” grossed more at the box office than any other nonmusical play had ever grossed on Broadway.Tickets for the hottest Broadway shows are now out of reach for many. And the same is true for other sought-after live events, such as pop concerts (which now cost hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars per ticket) and big sports games. (A few weeks before the Super Bowl, the cheapest available tickets were reselling for more than the average monthly mortgage payment.)In today’s newsletter, I’ll explain how Broadway seats became so eye-poppingly pricey.Trying to break evenProducing Broadway shows has become more expensive since the pandemic, and a vast majority of them lose money. So producers have been staging more short runs of plays with stars in lead roles — the stars attract ticket buyers, and the short runs allow those stars to more quickly return to filmmaking, which pays better than Broadway. Limited runs also seem to incentivize potential ticket buyers, because people find the now-or-never aspect motivating.There is, of course, a tension between profitability and accessibility. These prices are preventing some potential theatergoers from seeing high-profile productions of important work.Investors who spend money to bring shows to Broadway embrace high ticket prices because they want at least a shot at recouping their expenses. But many theater lovers, as they reminded me in a rollicking comments thread on the story I wrote about this subject last week, find these prices upsetting, because they want to see the shows they want to see at price points they consider reasonable.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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      Phylicia Rashad Knows Her Purpose

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      The first time Phylicia Rashad realized what she wanted to do with her life, she was making her way to the exit of a bustling auditorium. This was November 1959, in Houston, after a student music festival at the 9,000-seat Sam Houston Coliseum.Rashad, who was then Phylicia Allen, had been the festival’s mistress of ceremonies. Only 11 years old, she had won the role in a contest, beating out students from other Black elementary schools in her district, which remained defiantly segregated five years after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Rashad spent six weeks preparing for the concert — practicing introductions for the performers and memorizing a libretto for an orchestra. On the night of the show, she wore a brand-new yellow pinafore dress over a white shirt, white shoes, white socks with a ruffled trim and a flower tiara on top of freshly done curls.“When I walked out to the microphone to speak, I was suddenly in the spotlight for the first time,” she recalled in a recent interview. “The light was so bright, I couldn’t see anybody in the audience. So, every time I went up, I just talked to the light.”As she was leaving the venue, Rashad overheard the mothers of some students talking among themselves.“There she is,” she recalled hearing one say, gesturing toward her. “There’s that little girl who spoke so beautifully. Isn’t she beautiful?”Rashad had never thought of herself as beautiful. Among her family, she was sometimes teased because her rich brown skin was darker than that of her older brother, Tex, and younger sister, Debbie.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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      There’s Always Room in the Clown Car

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      For centuries, clowns have mostly been men. A new group of talent is changing that.AS A YOUNG woman in Mexico City, Gaby Muñoz, a 43-year-old performer known onstage as Chula the Clown, recalls, putting on makeup with her friends was always a fraught experience. “There was this whole idea of how to be a woman. They had this beautiful hair and these divine bodies, and I would look in the mirror and think, ‘Well, I guess not in this life.’ That made me laugh,” she says. As Chula — her round face washed white, her lips a tiny red heart, her eyebrows painted into inquisitive asymmetry — Muñoz, who this spring will begin touring through Europe and Central and South America, has played a jilted bride and a doddering old lady. She’s used her open, expressive face and antic physicality to joke wordlessly about loss, aging in a woman’s body and other concepts that have long been overlooked in the male-dominated world of clowns. For Muñoz, laughter isn’t an end in itself but rather, she says, “a way to connect.”Clowns, jesters, harlequins and fools have, of course, played a similar role throughout history. In ancient Greece, they served as ribald choristers in epic dramas, while emperors in Han dynasty China delighted in the buffoonish exertions of the court paiyou. Shakespeare’s world-weary wags spoke truth to King Lear and other royals, while the heyoka, the holy fool of many Sioux tribes, inverted day-to-day logic to provoke healing laughter. The emblematic sad clown that we know today evolved from the melancholic, talc-dusted Pedrolino of 16th-century Italian commedia dell’arte, while the contemporary circus clown, with his exaggerated face paint and physical wit, debuted on a London stage around 1800. (The one dressed in an ill-fitting suit and oversize shoes emerged as his clumsy foil seven decades later.) Though ritually and physically distinct, clowns have always been, as the heyoka John Fire Lame Deer writes with Richard Erdoes in their 1972 book, “Lame Deer Seeker of Visions,” “sacred, funny, powerful, ridiculous, holy, shameful, visionary.” They were also almost always men.During her childhood in Estonia, the 29-year-old London-based clown Julia Masli dreamed of acting in tragedies for exactly that reason: comedy, she assumed, was a man’s game. When, in 2017, she watched the legendary English clown Lucy Hopkins perform in Brighton for the first time, “seeing a woman do something so absurd and free felt like a revolution,” she says. In Masli’s show “Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha,” which debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2023 and has since toured internationally, she appears onstage as a doe-eyed Victorian vagabond who asks audience members to share their problems. As she offers solutions both genuine and absurd — enlisting a bored office worker to record the show’s minutes; duct-taping a lonely young woman to a group of strangers onstage — she transforms the emotional labor so often foisted on women into a source of laughter and catharsis.OTHER RISING FEMALE clowns, like the 26-year-old English actress Frankie Thompson and the 32-year-old Swiss Mexican theater artist Paulina Lenoir, use womanhood itself as a source of humor. In the former’s “Body Show,” performed with her collaborator the 29-year-old trans masculine anarchist clown Liv Ello, Thompson forgoes exaggerated makeup and costume, combining lip-syncing and confrontational bouffon (an approach to clowning that emphasizes absurdity and shock) to discuss her history with anorexia. Small and blond — “people treat me like this tiny-angel special little bird to be protected,” she says — Thompson makes herself grotesque by, say, licking the stage or choking down Marmite, eliciting laughter that implicates the audience in the humiliations of body dysmorphia. Meanwhile, Lenoir’s persona Puella Eterna feminizes the physical exaggeration of the classic male clown by wearing a corset, a flamenco skirt and a giant Minnie Mouse bow in lieu of a bulging nose. As master of ceremonies at her Fool’s Moon cabaret, Puella displays the kind of unearned self-assurance that usually wins praise for men and scorn for women.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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      In ‘Othello,’ Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal Are Prey and Predator

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      Shakespeare’s leanest tragedy gets a starry, headlong production that embraces the action but misses the mystery.Just moments earlier, he was an infatuated new husband, and she his “gentle love.” Now, in Act III, Scene 3 of “Othello,” he vows to kill her.What has happened? Why does Othello, the great Black general, the savior of Venice in a war with the Ottomans, resolve to murder Desdemona, the pearl of the white aristocracy he has won at great risk?The scene in which this strange alteration occurs is one of the most gripping, baffling episodes in Shakespeare, and it remains so in the starry Broadway revival of “Othello” that opened on Sunday at the Ethel Barrymore Theater.We can be grateful for that — and yet, in Denzel Washington’s commanding performance, what’s especially gripping is perhaps too baffling. As in his many movies, he leads with action, giving us a general whose psychology is as obscure to us as it is to him. Speaking very fast, with a slight mid-Atlantic accent, and stiffened by his ramrod military bearing, he betrays little evidence of the sorrows and injuries that moved Desdemona when he wooed her. Speed and decisiveness (“to be once in doubt is once to be resolved”) seem to matter more than emotion.Usually the obscure one is Othello’s ensign, Iago. Though Shakespeare provides many possible reasons he might have wanted to poison his commander with lies about Desdemona, awakening the famous green-eyed monster of jealousy, we are typically still in the dark at the end, when the cur is sent to his punishment. “I am not what I am” is his paradoxical, irreducible credo. Then what is he?Yet in a fascinating reversal, this “Othello” offers an Iago far more legible than his master. Jake Gyllenhaal’s eely take, with a physical wiggle to match his moral one, is a little bit mad scientist, a little bit Travis Bickle. His blue eyes pierce the atmospheric murk as he tracks all possible routes to his goal, like a rat in a maze, in the process allowing us to see how a twisted man thinks. He is a calculator of grievance; havoc is the carefully tabulated result. He adds up.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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      ‘Love Life,’ the Lost Great American Musical, Returns Over 75 Years Later

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      Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner’s pioneering “Love Life” was thwarted by circumstance. Now, it is coming to Encores! at New York City Center.For some people, seeing the musical “Love Life” in 1948 was an eye-opening experience.As a new show with music by Kurt Weill, and a book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner, it was a major Broadway event. So Stephen Sondheim got himself a ticket, as did his future collaborator Hal Prince. One night Fred Ebb, of Kander and Ebb, was in the house; another night, Bob Fosse.All of them would be influenced by “Love Life,” which tells the story of an American marriage over 150 years through a series of vaudeville acts. It’s by no means a classic, but its form pioneered the concept musical, a genre that would blossom a generation later in shows like Kander and Ebb’s “Cabaret” and “Chicago,” and Sondheim’s “Company” and “Follies.”Ebb would look back on “Love Life” as “a marvelous piece of theater.” Yet it hasn’t been seen in New York since that original run. Because of a musicians’ union strike, it was never recorded, nor was it published. Some songs lived on, but eventually it gained a reputation as the lost great American musical.The 1948 production (with Nanette Fabray, center) was inspired, in part, by Alan Jay Lerner, who was recently divorced and interested in writing “a cavalcade of American marriage.”Billy Rose Theater Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing ArtsThat is about to change. “Love Life” is finally returning to Manhattan on Wednesday, after decades of neglect and a five-year pandemic delay, for an Encores! production at New York City Center, directed by Victoria Clark and starring Kate Baldwin and Brian Stokes Mitchell.“It’s always seemed that ‘Love Life’ was jinxed,” said the scholar Kim Kowalke, who runs the Kurt Weill Foundation. “Maybe the jinx is off now.”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