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It wouldn’t be a New York theatre season without a rich selection of recent productions from London, and this spring is no exception. Among the many anticipated transfers set to open soon: Uptown, Sarah Snook embodies dandyism in The Picture of Dorian Gray ; downtown, Andrew Scott plays every role in Vanya ; and a little further downtown (okay, Brooklyn), Paul Mescal shows off his acting chops in A Streetcar Named Desire at BAM, while the Donmar Warehouse touring version of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard comes to St. Ann’s Warehouse. Notably, Dorian Gray and The Orchard are the work of Australian talent—Snook and adaptor-director Kip Williams in the former, and director Benedict Andrews in the latter—while Scott and Mescal are Irish. So we can't really talk about a British Invasion as such, but the season does provide an opportunity to see what became popular in good old England.
The premiere of the show “Operation Mince” by the group SpitLip will take place on March 20 at the Golden Theatre.
Illustration by Marco Quadri
If you like roast beef, bulldogs and British fun – part community theatre, part MI5 spy intrigue – you might want to check out the Broadway transfer of Operation Mincemeat , created by SpitLip, a collective that has come a long way from London’s vibrant experimental scene to the serious Fortune Theatre on the West End. The musical’s title references a real-life 1943 spy operation that used an anonymous corpse as a stand-in for a Royal Marine; the story has been retold in various books and a 2021 film. SpitLip’s production takes a deconstructionist approach, not only giving the Nazis a playful boy-band song in the second act. There’s also a deep dive into all the secrets of the plan, like how the military uses our bodies, not just against our will, but even after our will is gone. I was completely unfamiliar with Mincemeat on my visit to London, and it has become the show I most often recommend to others. Its appearance here saves New Yorkers a trip to Heathrow, but you might want to pop into Myers of Keswick first for a sausage roll to get your arteries filled with the appropriate spirit. — Helen Shaw
In the spotlight
Sourse: newyorker.com
