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They came out in droves: fans with color-coordinated fedoras and rotary phones; with thick, floppy hair bows; with blood-red sequins splattered across aprons and top hats. There was one fan wearing a wreath of red roses around their neck, and another who carried an open drawer containing a fake human lung.
Each outfit was its own personalized homage to the Broadway musical “Operation Mincemeat,” a West End export with no shortage of costumes and characters to emulate. The comedy’s fans lined up on a recent weekday outside the show’s stateside home at the Golden Theater, buzzing about the mysterious request that had brought them there.
The New York Times Magazine had asked for Mincefluencers. A lot of them. Preferably in costume.
Nearly 150 answered the call, promoted on the musical’s social media accounts, to appear in a photo shoot for the magazine. The colorful hats and sparkling aprons were scattered across a sea of crisp white shirts, smart neckties and suspenders — the standard uniform for the characters working at Britain’s intelligence service during World War II.
Among the crowd, with suspenders of her own, was Taffy Brodesser-Akner, a features writer at The Times Magazine who had — by this point, at least — seen the show 13 times. She plumbed the depths of her own obsession in an investigation for the magazine, which appears in Sunday’s issue alongside photos from the shoot. (She is “pretty sure,” she wrote underneath her byline on the article online, “that she could now perform at least two of the main roles of ‘Operation Mincemeat’ from beginning to end if called upon, say, in the theater right before showtime in an emergency, the way they ask on an airplane if there’s a doctor on board.”)
“I am obsessed with the three people who wrote the show and star in it,” Ms. Brodesser-Akner said. “I would have dressed like any of them, but this is the closest my own wardrobe has to accommodate the mission. So it looks like I’m dressed as Ewen Montagu, but really, I’m dressed as the actor who plays Ewen Montagu.”
That would be Natasha Hodgson, who plays the MI5 agent — and who, as Ms. Brodesser-Akner anticipated, arrived wearing a remarkably similar wardrobe. The entire company came to the shoot in costume, and with full hair and makeup, just a few hours before they were set to take the stage: Ms. Hodgson, David Cumming, Claire-Marie Hall, Jak Malone and Zoë Roberts.
The five of them play a collective 87 roles with bafflingly rapid-fire precision, in a zany romp about a British war plot to fool German troops. (That plot primarily involves a corpse. Hence the bloody costumes and the lung in a drawer.)
Getting the perfect shot inside the Golden was its own intricate task: The photographer, Chris Buck, and the magazine’s photo editors envisioned the cast onstage, with yellow confetti floating down over an audience of screaming admirers. Crew members load the cannons by hand, a time-consuming process — and at the end of every performance, the delicate pieces are shot out into the crowd from the mezzanine. That afternoon, the magazine would have only three confetti launches to nail the shot.
“You came here to be bonkers and I need you to be bonkers,” Mr. Buck told the audience.
“Muppet energy,” Ms. Brodesser-Akner suggested.
“Like they’re crying with exhaustion, Beatlemania style,” Mr. Buck agreed.
He sat back on the floor of the stage, facing the crowd. The cannon boomed, and the race began: As the confetti drifted slowly down, the actors had a brief window to jump into the air, over and over again, before all of the pieces hit the ground. They stood under the lights, leaping and high-kicking, to the beat of the show’s final song that plays as they take their bows.
And the over-the-top Beatlemania energy? The crowd delivered — first at full volume, and then silent-film style, when their hollering made it impossible for the actors to hear the music. For this group of fans, some of whom were in town from as far as London and Switzerland, or were children who had skipped school to take part, there was no acting necessary.
“There’s a line about small flashes of joy,” Ellen Rosoff, 44, said about the musical. She carried a teal rotary phone, similar to a prop in the show, and had seen “Operation Mincemeat” 48 times since June. “It says the world is a mess, and we just have to cling to the small flashes of joy. And this is a big flash of joy in my life. Whenever I can come, I come.”
In a quiet moment between shots, as Mr. Buck and the photo editors huddled around a monitor, someone in the audience began to hum the melody of a sea shanty from the musical. Soon more joined in, growing louder, until the entire room was serenading the cast:
If it’s down, it’s down together
If it’s up, it’s up as one
So, sail on, boys, through stormy weather
Soon the journey will be done.
The shoot wrapped after three hours. Ms. Brodesser-Akner, for one, had already acquired tickets for her 14th performance. And as the fans filed out of the theater and back into the lobby, a few had the same idea: They lined up outside the box office window, hoping to secure a ticket to watch the show later that evening.
Nancy Coleman is a Times editor who writes about theater.
The post The Times Needed Broadway Fans. Enter the Mincefluencers. appeared first on New York Times.
