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It wouldn’t be a New York theatre season without a hefty crop of recent London productions, and this spring is no different. Among the many transfers opening soon: uptown, Sarah Snook is dandyism personified in “The Picture of Dorian Gray”; downtown, you’ve got Andrew Scott playing all the parts in “Vanya”; and farther downtown (O.K., in Brooklyn) Paul Mescal flexes his acting muscles in “A Streetcar Named Desire,” at BAM, and the Donmar Warehouse’s touring version of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” arrives at St. Ann’s Warehouse. It’s worth noting that “Dorian Gray” and “Orchard” are the creative products of Australian talents—Snook and the director-adaptor Kip Williams in the former, and the director Benedict Andrews for the latter—and Scott and Mescal are Irish. So we’re not talking about a British invasion, per se, but the season does offer a chance to see what’s been a hit in Merry Olde England.
SpitLip’s “Operation Mincemeat” opens at the Golden Theatre on March 20.
Illustration by Marco Quadri
If you do want roast-beef, bulldog, pip-pip British jollity—half amateur theatrical, half M.I.5 romp—you can go to the Broadway transfer “Operation Mincemeat,” a piece by the collective SpitLip, which underwent a hero’s journey from London’s jolly experimental fringe to a serious business at the Fortune Theatre on the West End. The musical’s title refers to an actual intelligence caper, in 1943, which employed an anonymous corpse as a decoy Royal Marine; the story has been told, variously, in books and in a 2021 film. The SpitLip production takes a deconstructionist view, and not just by giving the Nazis a naughty boy-band song in the second act. There’s a thoughtful unpacking here of all the plan’s secret baggage, such as, for instance, the way militaries use our bodies, not just against our will but even after our will is gone. I was caught totally unawares by “Mincemeat” on a trip to London, and it became the show I recommended to the most folks, the most often. Having it here saves New Yorkers a flight to Heathrow, but maybe you could drop by Myers of Keswick first, for a sausage roll, to get your arteries into the proper spirit.—Helen Shaw
Spotlight
Michael Fassbender and Marisa Abela, in “Black Bag.”
Photograph courtesy Claudette Barius / Focus FeaturesMovies
Steven Soderbergh’s new spy thriller, “Black Bag,” written by David Koepp, has a stark setup: George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) and Kathryn St. Jean (Cate Blanchett) are a married pair of British secret agents. When George is informed that Kathryn may have gone rogue, he conducts the investigation. Much of the drama involves intimate confrontations filled with high-stakes talk, and Soderbergh, doing his own cinematography and editing, exerts himself mightily to make it feel like action. The cast of luminaries (including Regé-Jean Page and Marisa Abela) lend the thinly sketched characters distinctive personalities, but the real star is the technology of spycraft: Soderbergh grimly delights in exposing its eerie powers and potentially devastating uses.—Richard Brody (In wide release.)
About Town
Off Broadway
Jonathan Larson’s death at age thirty-five, in 1996, is a real-life tragedy of American theatre. He never saw his musical “Rent” make it to Broadway, let alone win multiple Tony Awards and a Pulitzer Prize. “The Jonathan Larson Project” brings a bit of him back, showcasing eighteen of his songs, some written for cabarets, some cut from longer works, some never performed. A cast of five delivers them revue style: there’s no narrative and little context aside from the program notes. That’s a missed opportunity, but the best numbers are dramas in themselves, including “Valentine’s Day,” about a formative S & M encounter, and “Hosing the Furniture,” in which a housewife cleans maniacally. Their singers—Andy Mientus and Lauren Marcus, respectively—drill deep into the fiery, convention-busting core of Larson’s legacy.—Dan Stahl (Orpheum; through June 1.)
Classical
Fanny Hensel, née Mendelssohn, is at the top of a scarily long list of women whose accomplishments have been outshone by titanic men close to them. Fanny was a wunderkind pianist and composer but, unlike her brother Felix, wasn’t able to pursue anything at a professional level, owing to pesky societal expectations. Her own father told her that music could be only “an ornament” in her life. In alignment with Women’s History Month, the Morgan Library & Museum offers a screening of the illuminating documentary “Fanny: The Other Mendelssohn,” from 2023, directed by her great-great-great-granddaughter. The film is preceded by a live performance of the “Easter Sonata”—a formful and sensitive piece signed “F. Mendelssohn,” in 1828, and mistakenly attributed to Felix until 2010, when handwriting analysis proved it to be Fanny’s.—Jane Bua (March 21.)
Dance
Sally Silvers’s “Pandora’s New Cake Stain” at Roulette, in 2022.
Photograph by Julie Lemberger
For more than forty years, the choreographer Sally Silvers has been offering audiences her cockeyed, defamiliarizing ideas of what dance can be. Often this comes in the form of smart, scrappy theatrical collages that juxtapose historical sources nobody else would put together, performed by highly trained dancers trying to forget their training, in a manner that’s slapdash and awkward but intentionally, meticulously, wittily so. Now, with “You Better,” she turns her attention to a figure from more than four thousand years ago, the Sumerian priestess Enheduanna, whom some scholars call the first named author in history. What might Silvers’s mind do with that?—Brian Seibert (Roulette; March 20-22.)
Off Broadway
Abe Koogler’s piercing, allegorical comedy “Deep Blue Sound,” exquisitely directed by Arin Arbus, introduces us to the eccentrics in a tiny Pacific Northwest island community: the tetchy, dying Ella (Maryann Plunkett); Annie (Crystal Finn), the town’s power-mad, powerless mayor; Ella’s estranged longtime friends John (Arnie Burton) and Mary (Miriam Silverman). Everyone seems to be trying to forge a shiny new relationship; everyone foolishly risks fumbling the love they have at hand. A pod of orcas has also disappeared from local waters, and a hilarious town meeting on the subject dissolves into farce. We and they know what’s happened—there’s no mystery. The earth loved us, but we got distracted, and forgot to keep our friends close when we could.—Helen Shaw (Public Theatre; through April 5.)
Electronic Music
Photograph by Samuel Bradley
Since the mid-twenty-tens, the Welsh electronic musician Kelly Lee Owens has continually delved deeper into an ethereal sound. Her self-titled début, from 2017, is a euphoric and euphonic blend of dream-pop and techno, throbbing yet heavenly. It’s music that blurs the lines between being lucid and in a trance. The follow-up, “Inner Song” (2020), was tenser, focussing more on voice, both literally and figuratively; in addition to a greater emphasis on vocals, Owens sharpened her perspective, wrestling with climate anxiety. An album released last year, “Dreamstate,” returns to reverie as an immersive experience, again with voice at the fore. There is a dazzling, almost celestial quality to Owens’s singing, which she deploys gracefully, even as beats chug directly into frame; the strobing floor-filling tracks defy gravity, so buoyant and effortless as to feel suspended.—Sheldon Pearce (Warsaw; March 25.)
Movies
For sheer suspense, few recent thrillers match Alain Guiraudie’s low-key but high-anxiety mystery “Misericordia.” It’s set in a small town in the South of France, where a young man named Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) returns after a long absence, for the funeral of his former employer—a baker named Jean-Pierre, on whom he had a crush. Jérémie stays on as a guest of the baker’s widow (Catherine Frot), but her son (Jean-Baptiste Durand) resents the prodigal’s return. The conflict turns violent, and the police get involved. Guiraudie sketches the resulting inquiries and evasions in sharp, brisk strokes; above all, he reveals the commonness of queer sexuality in the tradition-bound locale. The religious aspect of the title is embodied by a local priest (Jacques Develay) and involves an extraordinary scene of confession.—Richard Brody (In limited release.)
Bar Tab
Taran Dugal listens in at a chic Greenpoint lounge.
Illustration by Patricia Bolaños
New York, as the best gossips know, is a snoop’s paradise—a nirvana for nosiness, an intermeddler’s Eden. The city that never sleeps is perpetually prattling on. This past weekend, two amateur observers stopped by Eavesdrop, a chic lounge in Greenpoint, to see if it would live up to its name. It didn’t take long: at a high-top table in a back room, the pair quickly picked up on a conversation featuring the trademark peacocking of a first date. “I simply loved the volcano hikes in the Azores,” a man with a salt-and-pepper beard said. “But that place was almost too rural for me.” “When I was in Norway,” the woman across from him countered, “I went on a sauna date with a Norwegian.” She faltered, then regained her footing. “But it wasn’t, like, a weird, sexual thing.” Thankfully for our Sherlocks, the bar’s arsenal of cocktails—including the sweet, aptly named Kaleidoscope No. 4 (rum, mezcal, rice wine, strawberry, passion-fruit liqueur, egg white) and the smooth, aromatic Mrs. Plum (gin, amontillado, lemon, rye, demerara, tonic)—was nearly enough to dispel the awkwardness in the air. A state-of-the-art sound system bumped “Scirocco,” a jazzy nu-disco LP by the Dutch trio Kraak & Smaak, its gentle vinyl crackles a balm for the psyche, as was a delectable plate of white beans, anchovies, rosemary, and potato chips that a waitress graciously suggested. Inquiring minds assuaged, the newcomers reached for the check—but, as Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Energy” began to play, the bill tray slipped out of their hands, hitting the floor with the softest of thumps. Almost immediately, a waiter swooped in. “I’ve got an ear for these kinds of things,” he said. The rookies, outsnooped and further inspired, took their leave.
P.S. Good stuff on the internet:
- Doggie dance party
- “Dear Ms. Lonely Arts”
- Who is Mark Carney?
Sourse: newyorker.com
