Carp himself (terrific Tracy Letts regular Ian Barford) who at last re-enacts the raucous meeting Mr. The uniformly outstanding cast, many of whom appeared in the original Chicago run, includes the town clerk (Jessie Mueller) responsible for the missing “minutes”, and Mr. Todd Freeman), who wastes everyone’s time trying to talk his fellow council members into sponsoring a money-making scheme called the “Lincoln Smackdown”, a racially-charged caged boxing match between paid townsfolk and a martial arts expert dressed like Abraham Lincoln. Breeding (Cliff Chamberlain) and self-serving Mr. Innes (Blair Brown) to lecherous, ass-grabbing and aptly named Mr. Oldfield (veteran actor Austin Pendleton) and matronly, long-winded Ms. While the mystery of the unfinished minutes grows, we get to know the diverse flaws and character peculiarities of the nine council members with amusingly ironic names, from the ancient Mr. (Author Tracy Letts takes on this rapidly divisive role and distinguishes himself in the part.)

When he persists, the crafty mayor becomes indignant, then belligerent. But no one will acknowledge his request for information or respond when he asks for a reading of the minutes from the previous week’s meeting. Carp did to invite dismissal, and why he has subsequently mysteriously disappeared. Peel wants to know what happened at the crucial meeting he missed, what his friend Mr. The two men had shared similar ideals and become friendly allies, and Mr. Peel (played with a keen conscience and a sense of responsible civic pride by popular Schitt’s Creek star Noah Reid, making his Broadway debut)-a clean-cut, idealistic, fair-minded and liberal-thinking (but naive) dentist who missed the last meeting because he had to attend his mother’s funeral. Carp, whose absence concerns the board’s newest and youngest addition, Mr.

There is one empty chair belonging to Mr. The occasion is a city council meeting attended by nine board members in a hamlet called Big Cherry. When you enter the converted dance floor of New York’s infamous old Studio 54, you’re blasted by patriotic marches and awed by the setting: the huge arched-ceilinged conference room of a small-town city hall replete with tables, desks, and walls of maps, plaques, proclamations and other relics of political detritus on a harsh and noisy stormy night. Shapiro, intact, along with its amazing set designer, David Zinn, and several original cast members. The Minutes was world premiered by Chicago’s esteemed Steppenwolf Theatre in 2017, scheduled for a Broadway transfer in 2018, and then derailed by the coronavirus pandemic until now, arriving at last with its original director, Anne D. You will probably leave at the end with very mixed feelings, but you will talk about it, think about it, and go away with the knowledge that you have never seen anything like it. His latest to open on Broadway is The Minutes, a sharp, caustic, often brilliant, funny and sometimes confusing political satire that runs 90 minutes without an intermission. Tracy Letts is a Renaissance man in a rock-and-roll world, whose catalog of plays aimed at clarifying the troubles and shocks in the morally disintegrating world we live in usually succeed even if they seem complicated and infuriatingly exasperating in the process. (Photo by Bruce Glikas/WireImage) THE MINUTES | 1 hour 30 minutes | Studio 54, 254 W. Opening night of the play “The Minutes” on Broadway at The Studio 54 Theater in York City.

Tracy letts the minutes