Last Saturday, on a very cold and wet February evening, you could see a parade of varying shades of yellow shuffling into the Golden Theatre. That could only mean one thing on 45th street — Operation Mincemeat has finally hit the shores of America. On February 15, the new British musical played its first performance here on Broadway and Theatrely was on the scene to capture the night. 

If you aren’t too familiar with the little known World War II British deception operation, you are in luck thanks to SpitLip, a musical theatre troupe from the United Kingdom who has penned what just might be one of the funniest musicals to hit Broadway in years. When you look at the makeup of the current Broadway season we have massive IP from Betty Boop to Buena Vista Social Club hitting our stages, but a silly ragtag group of five British performers dancing and singing about the Second World War might just give them all a run for their money. 

All five performers: David Cumming, Claire-Marie Hall, Natasha Hodgson, Jak Malone, and Zoë Roberts are making their Broadway debuts with Mincemeat and as audience members you can tell there is a special chemistry among them all. The show debuted in 2019 and has practically been playing ever since jumping from house to house Off-West End and finally debuting on the West End in 2023 where it has since been extended… 12 times. The musical was nominated for seven Olivier Awards and took home the crown for both Best New Musical as well as Best Actor in a Supporting Role, for Malone. 

Now Broadway was where they set their sights to next. The biggest question being: how would New York respond to this darling of a musical. From the cheers of their first performance, I would say Broadway is welcoming them with pretty open arms. 

As I found my seat in the Golden Theatre and waited for the illuminated yellow curtain to rise, I found myself chatting with those around me. Behind me, Sarah had seen the musical 37 times and stated that she simply couldn’t miss their first performance on Broadway. And Steven who works in hospitality in Times Square came to see the show simply based off the buzz he saw online; he had purchased tickets the day they went on sale to see what it was all about. 

In our current climate of theatre, it is always ideal to have a fan base before you open for a commercial run in Midtown, and the Mincefluencers, as they are called, came out to represent. Apparently hundreds of fans flew over from London to be there to celebrate the show making its way to New York. Following the evening’s performance, the fans serenaded the cast with a song from the show as they came out to sign their first Playbills and greet their audience. 

Operation Mincemeat seems to be the perfect mixture of British farce mixed with contemporary musical theatre. The team has cracked the code for what modern audiences want for a night out on the town and we will certainly be watching closely how audiences react to this gem of a show. They officially open March 20 and just this week the show was extended through July 13. For now, you can catch it eight times a week at the Golden, and if I were you I would secure your seats now before you aren’t able to very soon.   

Two current off-Broadway plays openly use history, not only as a means of examining where things went wrong, but as a shaky base for our own contemporary knowledge.

The Antiquities, Jordan Harrison’s intelligent new play, is structured as a tour of a natural history museum dedicated to the “Late Human age,” with its curators presenting 12 exhibits exploring how our kind phased itself out. Beginning with Mary Shelley dreaming up a machine man for Frankenstein in 1816 and ending long after humanity has been bred out of the Earth (2240), it traces a compelling line from our first flirtations with artificial life to its eventually catastrophic takeover of the natural one. A very game and versatile cast of nine alternate as a type of living mannequins in these discrete scenes, neatly boxed into their dioramas (Paul Steinberg did the scenic design, which verges on haunting sheet-metal de Chirico; Tyler Micoleau the lighting) and ably directed to find poignancy in the uncanny by David Cromer and Caitlin Sullivan. Checking in on humans interacting with several forms of technology, from the immediately life-changing (medical prosthetics) to the seemingly frivolous (actors worried about losing gigs to AI performances), Harrison warms up the structure’s possible technological iciness (and its New Yorker-style wit) with a gently-deployed, more human observational thread: it wasn’t just the robots that killed us, but our gradual loss of empathy, displayed here through characters struggling to reckon with parenthood, queerness, differences in ambition or disease. When the tour reaches its final exhibit and begins to move backwards, it’s that eye for compassion that cuts deepest.

Compassion is foregrounded from the outset at Liberation, Bess Wohl’s semi-autobiographical latest, which mines a weekly women’s consciousness-raising meeting in 1970 suburban Ohio for answers as to why we’re still fighting the same battles. The Wohl stand-in (Susannah Flood) begins with a direct address to the audience: her mother’s recent death has caused her to wonder (a) how the advancements made by mid-century feminists could have so frustratingly been rolled back, and (b) how such an independent spirit – she organized those meetings and wrote for Gloria Steinem’s Ms. magazine – could have traded in a life of radical ideals to raise children within a traditional marriage. Flood spends a little less than half of the play in this mode, interviewing the still-living members of that group and grappling earnestly with her findings. But, for the most part, she (as the stand-in) steps into the role of her mother, Lizzie, who is wading through those same questions with similar awkwardness. Also at these meetings, which take place at a community center gym: Margie (Betsy Aidem), an older housewife with cutting wit; Susan (Adina Verson), a butch biker fallen on tough times; Isidora (Irene Sofia Lucio), a Sicilian filmmaker and talkative firebrand; Dora (Audrey Corsa), a prim young woman who thought she was joining a knitting club; and Celeste (Kristolyn Lloyd), a big city editor and the group’s sole Black member. Director Whitney White wrangles the ensemble cast with her usual thrilling skill, coaxing deeply human and individual performances from each. David Zinn’s set and Qween Jean’s costumes are equally spot-on and specific. Wohl has fun with form and structure with a stimulating transparency, cycling through traditional in-universe scenes, fourth-wall-breaking speeches in the present day, and other Brechtian flourishes like the late addition of two performers, Kayla Davion and Charlie Thurston, to jolt the play alive as it slightly sputters toward the end of its first act. Questions of love and freedom, ethics and goals, history and foresight, and sisterhood and marriage are thoughtfully explored with great humor, and through a fantastic cast.

The Antiquities is in performance through March 2, 2025 at Playwrights Horizons on West 42nd Street in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.

‍Liberation is in performance through March 30, 2025 at the Laura Pels Theatre on West 46th Street in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.

SLAMDANCE GARAGE

Don’t you just want to scream? 

Ian Andrew Askew figures you might. The versatile writer, performer and sound designer’s thundering new work SLAMDANCE Garage is—in part—a punk rock howl of anger. Askew even invites the audience to join together, at one point, in a collective wail. 

Not that Garage is not solely defined by rage. Askew’s tightly structured solo piece begins from a place of anger, but soon moves into melancholy reflection ahead of a rousing finish. Somewhere between rock concert, monologue and dance, the piece reflects powerfully on existing as Black and queer within both the punk scene and the world at large. 

Garage is also a call to action. Askew offers no easy answers, no prescriptive path. But the show is the message: Askew presents their full self, in all their tenderness and rage, all the rich complexity we are pushed to negate. Just scream it all out. 

300 PAINTINGS

When a solo piece recounting a period of mania begins to feel like a manic episode itself, how should an audience feel? At what point should we grow concerned? 

That’s the deliberate question raised by Sam Kissajukian’s frantic delivery of his story in his forthright new work 300 Paintings. The Australian comedian’s autobiographical show, which returns to Vineyard Theatre following a run last fall, concerns a sixth month period in which Kissajukian isolated himself from friends while creating hundreds of bizarre large-scale art pieces. Recounting this episode, Kissajukian now frames it as a symptom of then-undiagnosed bipolar disorder. 

One is loath to support off-Broadway’s increasing penchant for low-cost solo works, but I must confess: this is an excellent show, witty, open-hearted, sharp and keenly structured. Kissajukian is an endearing storyteller, and while his delivery can be over-eager at points, he mostly strikes an expert balance between self-mockery and blunt honesty. 

Most striking, though, are the points when Kissajukian’s delivery becomes fast and furious to the point of near-unintelligibility. It is certainly intentional, a way to immerse us in the moment-by-moment experience of overwhelming mania. But it also feels startlingly genuine. Kissajukian still lives with this disorder now, and even as we laugh, it’s in the room with us, present and real. 

WHERE WE’RE BORN

The work of Lucy Thurber proves an ideal fit for young company Adult Film, a scrappy new outfit operating out of a private space in Ridgewood, Queens. Adult Film is presenting a barebones, intensely atmospheric revival of Thurber’s 2003 play Where We’re Born through February 9th, under David Garelik’s effective direction.  

Thurber tends towards small, intimate stories set against a grand social canvas. In Where We’re Born, scholarship student Lilly (Michelle Moriarty) returns to her Western Massachusetts hometown looking to slip back into old routines—drinking, smoking pot and lounging around with friends. But she’s stuck between here and there, and for those who never “got out,” Lilly’s return ends up wreaking havoc.

The production is a heavier lift for Adult Film than past work, and a notable step forward. There’s no distance or irony to Thurber’s text, no remove to hide behind. If this staging at times feels like poverty cosplay, that’s perhaps inevitable with indie theatermakers doing a play of this nature in a Ridgewood basement. 

Yet a game cast keeps it grounded—most especially the women. Moriarty’s Lilly is brutally open-hearted; Jamie Coffey is movingly bone-weary as Franky. And Garelik ultimately uses the space to his advantage. Thurber’s plays live in America’s most suffocating corners, and in this production’s more convincing moments, it can truly feel like the walls are closing in. 

NINA

“No-one wants to see a play about people who do plays,” insists Kyla, one of five female acting students at the center of Forrest Malloy’s dark comedy Nina. “It’s so self-indulgent.” 

It’s one of the groan-ier laugh lines in Malloy’s shaky, occasionally stirring new play. Set backstage at a prestigious acting conservatory, Nina traces the final year of five talented but insecure women’s time in the program, leading up to a high-stakes production of The Seagull.

The performances are excellent, and director Katie Birenboim finds the subtler laughs. But the play is at its worst when focused too squarely on satirizing self-obsessed performers and cutthroat acting schools. Both are low-hanging fruit, and while anyone who has endured an acting program will likely see themselves on stage, the rest of us will get bored quick.

But when Malloy’s text digs deeper, something transcendent does emerge. Specifically the journey of Kyla, the quietest of the group, who emerges triumphantly from her shell over the play’s 100 minutes. A terrific Jasminn Johnson carries off Kyla’s growth with delicate delight. And in Kyla’s parallel journeys as both actor and individual, Malloy finds a more profound connection between performance and self-actualization. 

THE BARBARIANS

A delightful if disjointed antidote to doomerism, Jerry Lieblich’s new political satire The Barbarians is surprisingly hopeful about our future. Set in a heightened, alternate United States where words are jumbled nonsense and “Madame President Fake President” is declaring war on everything, Lieblich’s bizarre play follows two scientists’ efforts to weaken the power of verbal demagoguery. To do so, the scientists have built a wacky, colorful machine. With a “strapulator.” And a “Heep-Jeep Generator.” 

It’s a grand, silly old time, energetically staged by Paul Lazar (who also stepped adeptly into a lead role at my performance). Lieblich’s frequent collaborator Steve Mellor, star of their off-off-Bway hit Mahinerator, is especially terrific as a chaotic narrator frequently interrupting the proceedings with rambling side-plots. But the momentum sags in the play’s last thirty minutes, as it becomes clear that Lieblich’s many threads are never going to satisfyingly cohere. 

A note in the program specifies that The Barbarians was first written in response to the War on Terror, and it does feel like it. Plainly, Lieblich is not writing about any single president. But the play’s critique of war-hungry, weaponized patriotism feels a bit too Bush-era specific to fully resonate at this moment.

SLAMDANCE garage continues at The Bushwick Starr through March 1. 300 Paintings continues at Vineyard Theatre through Feb 23. Where We’re Born and Nina have concluded their runs. The Barbarians continues at LaMaMa Experimental Theatre Club through March 2.