9/5/2023 0 Comments The minutes broadway synopsis![]() Mueller, Reid Jeremy DanielĪs the routine business of a city council meeting unfolds, with all its backstabbing, personal agendas, pet peeves and unstated histories on full comic display, the mystery of the missing Mr. Johnson (Jessie Mueller), the efficient city clerk whose good sense and suggestion of ethics gives the suspicious Peel cause for optimism. Assalone (Jeff Still), the corrupt brother of the local sheriff and Ms. Breeding (Cliff Chamberlain), the bullying second-in-charge Mr. Matz (Sally Murphy), the nervous ditz Mr. Oldfield (a hilarious Austin Pendleton), the council elder whose disagreeability is equaled by his confusion Ms. Innes (Blair Brown), the flinty, bloviating grande dame Mr. Todd Freeman), the sole Black official who knows all too well how to protect himself, even when championing a ludicrous festival attraction involving a martial arts-trained Abraham Lincoln Ms. Hanratty (Danny McCarthy), an enlightened do-gooder who dreams of spearheading a new, handicapped-accessible town monument that’s outrageously disproportionate to small-town needs Mr. Letts himself plays Mayor Superba, the stalwart, vaguely congenial leader who quickly cuts off any discussion that veers too closely to certain events Mr. The Big Cherry City Council is loaded with enough strangely-named characters to fuel any number of sitcoms. Carp suddenly gone missing? – spins The Minutes from quirky workplace comedy to increasingly dire mystery.Īnd what a workplace. Peel was absent from the last meeting due to a death in his family, and his at-first casual, then determined efforts to find out what exactly transpired – specifically, why has council member Mr. Peel (Reid, putting the good will stockpiled from his Schitt’s Creek tenure to excellent effect). ![]() What, exactly, transpired at the previous week’s meeting is something of a mystery, at least to the idealistic newcomer Mr. The Big Cherry City Council still opens its closed-door meetings with prayers and pledges of allegiance. David Zinn’s remarkable set – a detail-perfect recreation of homey but generic government chambers that pretend to grandeur while rather smugly displaying the paper plate jack-o’-lanterns of local schoolchildren. The play – a comedy, a mystery, an allegory – unfolds entirely in real time at a city council meeting of Big Cherry, a small town that could be anywhere shy of the Twilight Zone (or maybe not so shy). If the new play, opening tonight at Broadway’s Studio 54, doesn’t have the widely relatable, if curdled, domesticity of August, it is nonetheless charged with the shock of truth, both in its dead-on depiction of bureaucratic, any-town pettiness, personal greed and the larger delusions at the dark heart of American history. 'Summer, 1976' Broadway Review: Laura Linney & Jessica Hecht Summon A Haunting Friendship
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