Theater Kids Revisited

 

[Last June, I posted “Theater Kids,” devoted entirely to “How To Tell If You’re a Theatre Kid,” an excerpt from John DeVore’s memoir, Theatre Kids: A True Tale of Off-Off Broadway (Applause, Theatre & Cinema Books, 2024), published on the American Theatre magazine website.  This past January, a New York Times article caught my attention, so now I’m going to revisit the topic of “theater kids.”  I think the titles of the individual articles I’m reposting pretty well reveal what this collection is about.

[In the introduction to the 23 June 2025 post, I define what a theater kid is:

a young person, usually a student, who is deeply passionate about and involved in theatrical performance.  They are often characterized by their enthusiastic embrace of performing arts, particularly musicals, and may exhibit traits like spontaneously breaking into song—almost always one from a musical—or quoting lines from shows.

[I go on to say, “I wasn’t a theater kid,” referencing my autobiographical post “A Broadway Baby” (22 September 2010)—though I acknowledge that that label did fit me.

[The three articles below are the New York Times report that started off a little brouhaha in the theater world, the Playbill article that called attention to that to-do, and a management association article that lays out the insiders’ response.  If you were a theater kid, or you knew one, you might find the exchange interesting—perhaps even touching.] 

“HOW ‘THEATER KID’ MORPHED INTO A POLITICAL INSULT”
by Sopan Deb 

[The New York Times article ran on 8 January 2026 in “Arts” (Section C).  It was posted online on 21 December 2025 as “Move Aside, Snowflake: ‘Theater Kid’ Is the New Go-To Political Insult.”]

Used as a pejorative, usually by the right, the phrase tags ‘the outsiders, the weirdos.’

Move over Karen and snowflake. There’s a new go-to political put-down: Theater kid.

Last month, the comedian Tim Dillon referred to New York City’s mayor-elect, Zohran Mamdani, as a “theater kid,” arguing that Mr. Mamdani’s victory speech was “a little cringe.”

[Tim Dillon (b. 1985) is a stand-up comic, podcaster, and actor known for his unrestrained satirical humor and social commentary. He hosts the popular podcast The Tim Dillon Show, which covers news, politics, and culture and airs at 9 a.m. (Pacific Time) Saturdays on YouTube (video) and Spotify (audio). The referenced show about Mayor-Elect Mamdani was broadcast on 8 November 2025, four days after Mamdani won the New York City mayoral election.]

After Mr. Mamdani appeared in the Oval Office for a surprisingly cordial meeting with President Trump [Friday, 21 November 2025], Jack Posobiec, a Trump loyalist and conspiracy theorist, wrote on X, “Theater kids always crumble if you actually press them.” (He also released an episode of his podcast titled “MAGA vs The Theater Kids: Do You Want Drama or Do You Want Victory?”)

Mr. Mamdani, a former improv student, actually is a theater fan. But he’s not the only target.

When Senator Alex Padilla, Democrat of California, was forcibly removed from a news conference in June after trying to question Kristi Noem, the [now-former] homeland security secretary, The Daily Caller [right-wing news and opinion website based in Washington, D.C. and founded by political commentator Tucker Carlson and political advisor Neil Patel] published an article with the headline ”Democrat Theater Kid Learns He’s Not Above the Law.”

Weeks later, the conservative publication American Thinker [daily online magazine dealing with American politics from a politically conservative viewpoint] ran an article saying that Mr. Padilla and a Who’s Who list of prominent Democrats were, you guessed it, theater kids. After a group of Democratic lawmakers released a video last month reminding troops that they could refuse illegal orders, Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center [U.S. government agency responsible for national and international counterterrorism efforts], described them as ”theater kids encouraging an insurrection.”

You get the picture, which raises the question: What did theater kids do to attract so much scorn?

It depends on whom you ask.

For Scott Jennings, a conservative CNN commentator, the increased use of the term is a result of “performance-based radicalism” on the left. As an example, he cited a video from 2019 that resurfaced in the final weeks before a special election for a House seat in Tennessee. It showed the Democratic candidate, Aftyn Behn, in tears, being dragged out of Gov. Bill Lee’s office during a sit-in protest, which called for the removal of a state legislator accused of sexual assault. (Ms. Behn lost by 9 percentage points in a district that Mr. Trump carried by 22 points last year.)

“These people are a sandwich board and a megaphone short of the loony bin,” Mr. Jennings said in an interview. “They think it’s actual politics. They think this is something good, and the rest of us are looking at it going, ‘Man, there go the theater kids again.’”

It’s not clear when the term gained currency, but an early example of its use as a pejorative dates to the final weeks of the 2024 presidential campaign when the conservative operative Matt Whitlock said on social media that Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, was “just a theater kid performing a sketch.”

Caricaturing political opponents with simple insults has become a hallmark of Trump-era politics. Think “Low Energy” Jeb Bush. Republicans, led by the president, have elevated name-calling to an art form, but Democrats have dabbled, too, with mixed results.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, called Republicans “weird” and turned it into a calling card of his candidacy. More recently, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, a leading Democratic critic of Mr. Trump who has worked to position himself for a possible 2028 presidential run, has taken to mimicking the president’s approach — calling him “Dozy Don,” among other insults.

Social media has made such put-downs catch on faster.

“In politics, just like in journalism, you’re always trying to make 10 words five, five words three, two words one, right?” Matt Gorman, a Republican strategist, said. “The way to do that really effectively, and we’ve seen this for generations, is you find ways to short-circuit that through connotations.”

Using “theater kids” pejoratively is a way of tagging opponents as dramatic and performative without having to use those words, Mr. Gorman said.

Theater kids became an indelible part of the culture when television series and films like “Glee,” “High School Musical” and “Smash” [see “‘What I learned from Smash (if I didn’t know anything about theater)’” by RonAnnArbor (9 June 2013)] hit the airwaves, though the popularity of those shows set theater kids up as the subject of parody.

“We are a ton of energy and we can be chaotic, but I find that that’s not actually the qualities that people are pointing out when they talk about the theater kid,” said Zhailon Levingston, a director of the upcoming Broadway production of “Cats: The Jellicle Ball.” “What they’re talking about is the person who refuses to stay silent in the face of something that needs to be spoken to.”

For the last half-century or so, it hasn’t been considered “cool” to be a theater aficionado, said Julia Knitel, who was nominated for a Tony Award for her performance in the musical “Dead Outlaw” [2025].

“‘Theater kid’ being the bullied party is a tale as old as time,” Ms. Knitel said. “We’ve always been the outsiders, the weirdos. It’s a quick cultural shorthand to treat us as the underdog.”

Some see a more harmful motive for deploying the moniker as a political insult.

“My initial reaction was just that it feels homophobic,” said Jacob Kerzner, an assistant professor of musical theater at Syracuse University. Mr. Kerzner added that theater is an unusual art in that “you couldn’t replace theater with any other art form in this context.”

“‘They’re all painters now’ doesn’t quite have the same ring to it,” he said.

Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, the author of a recent biography of Lin-Manuel Miranda [Lin-Manuel Miranda: The Education of an Artist (Simon & Schuster, 2025)], said that using the term was part of a larger culture battle.

“A lot of kids playfully adopt the ‘theater kid’ moniker, even with its tinge of attention-seeking excess, because theater offers a space for performing a wider range of emotions and identities than much of our society allows,” Mr. Pollack-Pelzner said in an email. “Since right-wingers want to crack down on exploring gender, race and sexuality in schools, it’s sadly not surprising that they’d try to wield ‘theater kid’ as an insult to discredit progressive politics.”

The dings against theater lovers have come mostly from the right, but not exclusively so. Dhaaruni Sreenivas, a data scientist who has worked for Democratic consulting firms, wrote on X that the perception of the Democratic Party “as a safe space for rule-following theater kids is really bad for our image.” She followed that up with a Substack post [Substack is an online, ad-free platform that enables writers, podcasters, and creators to publish content directly to subscribers via email, while offering options for monetization through paid subscriptions] titled, “Theater Kids and Playing Risk.”

“You know the kids in ‘Glee’? Super cheerful and go-getters?” Ms. Sreenivas, who was a delegate for Kamala Harris at the 2024 Democratic National Convention, said in an interview. “They’re kind of despised by their peers. And it’s a problem because Americans kind of are nerdist. They do not like nerds.”

To Ms. Sreenivas, theater kids are “desperate for the approval of authority figures” and “really want to follow the rules and get rewarded for it.” Basically, she added, “they want to perform being good kids.”

Not everyone minds the moniker. Theater kids, Ms. Knitel said, are emotionally intelligent, empathetic, communicative, charismatic and in touch with their feelings. Those qualities, she said, don’t align with the “current administration.”

“They don’t want us to be empathetic and they don’t want us to care about those around us,” she said, “and they don’t want us to be open to expanding our horizons and feeling things deeply, because then we’re not as easily going to fall in line.”

[Sopan Deb is a New York Times reporter covering breaking news and culture.]

*  *  *  *
“IN RESPONSE TO NEW YORK TIMES,
EDUCATIONAL THEATRE ASSOCIATION LAUNCHES
PROUD THEATRE KID CAMPAIGN”
by Diep Tran

[Playbill, the National Theatre Magazine, picked up the story with a report on 23 December 2025 revealing that the Educational Theatre Association had taken umbrage at the content of the Times’ article.]

The campaign is in response to an article that said that “theatre kid” is the new conservative insult.

On December 21, the New York Times published an article with the headline: “Move Aside, Snowflake: ‘Theater Kid’ Is the New Go-To Political Insult” [that's the online title; see above]. It attributed the rise of conservative pundits using “theatre kid” as an insult, to denote a “performance-based radicalism”—such as a conspiracy theorist calling incoming New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani a theatre kid (though Mamdani has said he listens to Hamilton and Dear Evan Hansen in the car).

In response, the Educational Theatre Association has launched the Proud Theatre Kid campaign to celebrate theatre kids everywhere. Said Dr. Jennifer Katona, executive director of EdTA, “This weekend, our members made it clear that the New York Times article touched a nerve. We felt it was important to stand up as leaders of the theatre education community and affirm what ‘theatre kid’ really means: creativity, discipline, collaboration, and empathy. The response today has been overwhelming, and it underscores the pride and unity of this community.”

The Association asked its followers to share why they are proud theatre kids. One respondent, who is a reverend, wrote: “My son is 14 and is confident, kind, and creative. I couldn’t be prouder! What a wonderful life both of us have found in the theatre. The world needs more of what theatre creates.”

Another respondent wrote: “The best description of theatre that I’ve ever heard is ‘the gym for empathy.’ It strengthened my ability to listen, to express complex ideas, and to put myself in others’ shoes. I can see why that’s threatening to certain politicians and pundits.” 

The Educational Theatre Association is a nonprofit focused on theatre education, serving as a professional association for theatre educators. EdTA is the parent organization of the International Thespian Society, a student honor society that has inducted more than 2.5 million thespians since 1929. Additionally, EdTA operates the Educational Theatre Foundation, the organization’s philanthropic arm dedicated to increasing opportunity and access to school theatre.

Said a representative from EdTA: “At the heart of this campaign is a simple belief: if even one student misses out on the life-changing impact of theatre education, we are all worse off. We want our community to stand together and refuse to let anyone else define what ‘theatre kid’ means.”

EdTA and Playbill are currently collaborating on a new Content Creator Scholarship that will send three students to the 2026 International Thespian Festival.

[Diep Tran is an arts journalist and editor based in New York City.  She is currently the Editor in Chief of Playbill.  Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, NBC News, New York magazine, Time Out New York, Backstage, CNN, Salon, Primetimer, Broadway News, New York Theatre Guide and other publications.  Her previous day jobs include being features editor of Broadway.com and senior editor of American Theatre magazine.  In 2023, she was named on Gold House’s A100 list as one of 100 most impactful Asians.  She loves musical theater, period dramas, and sci-fi/fantasy TV shows.]

*  *  *  *
“TEACHERS’ GROUP LAUNCHES
EFFORT TO RECLAIM ‘THEATER KID’”
by Mark Athitakis  

[EdTA’s position and its response were laid out in Associations Now in a 13 January 2026 post.  Associations Now is a daily news platform of the American Society of Association Executives (ASAE), which serves professionals in the association management field.]

The Educational Theatre Association’s #ProudTheatreKid campaign caught attention on social media, providing a boost to its advocacy message. 

A national theater organization launched a pop-up campaign to push back against the increasingly pejorative use of the term “theater kid,” galvanizing its member base in support of its advocacy goals.

On December 21, the New York Times published an article titled “Move Aside, Snowflake: ‘Theater Kid’ Is the New Go-To Political Insult” [see above]. The story showed how the term has been used to criticize New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, Senator Alex Padilla (D-CA), and other Democratic lawmakers.

The story naturally caught the attention of the Educational Theatre Association (EdTA), which represents theater-education professionals and supports middle- and high-school theater students through its awards and foundation programs. 

“We absolutely felt like there was no space to not respond,” said EdTA Executive Director Dr. Jennifer Katona.

According to Katona, the organization has two million alumni across its 97 years of existence. “That’s two million theater kids,” she said. “The theater kid is our brand. It’s who we are, it’s who we care about, it’s who we talk about every day. We take a lot of pride in that, and we truly believe that a theater program in a school is not just about the performances, but about all the skills that are developed for students’ involvement in that, and also what that program does to the school and the community at large.” [See the post on this blog “The Relation of Theater to Other Disciplines” (21 July 2011).]

Though EdTA’s staff was largely off for the holiday break, it developed a rapid social-media response, using the hashtag #ProudTheatreKid on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. “Theatre kids are academically strong,” the posts read in part. “They are emotionally intelligent. They are collaborative leaders and creative thinkers.” Readers were encouraged to share their own theater experiences growing up.

The posts struck a chord with EdTA members theater fans in general. The Broadway industry bible Playbill covered the campaign [see above], and the posts drew more than 1,200 shares on Facebook and more than 7,700 likes on Instagram. “If it wasn’t up by that evening, it was the next day,” Katona said. “It’s probably four or five times the reshares, if not more, that we usually get,” she said.

More than just attempting to blunt the use of “theater kid” as an insult, the campaign has given EdTA a platform to promote its advocacy work entering 2026. Last week, EdTA used the term “proud theatre kid” as a way to encourage registration for its annual March advocacy summit, which includes a visit with legislators on Capitol Hill and workshops on how participants can promote theater education in their own communities. 

“This comes at a time of years of their craft being under attack, with no-drag bills, the slicing of budgets, and the way some of our states and teachers have been censored,” Katona said. “So this felt like a line in the sand for everybody. This is really propelling us into action. It goes beyond just asking people to change your Facebook status. It’s: Let’s try to come together and go to DC and talk about the value of what we do. That’s where we’re taking it.”

[Mark Athitakis, a contributing editor for Associations Now, has written on nonprofits, the arts, and leadership for a variety of publications.  He is a coauthor (with Mark Lasswell) of The Dumbest Moments in Business History (Portfolio. 2004).]

Spy vs. Spy

[Almost 10 years ago, I posted a report on Rick On Theater about  the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C. (see “Spook Museum,” 25 March 2010).  The other day, I read “Revealing Some Spy Secrets, but Not All,” a review in the “Arts” section of the New York Times (6 August ) of an exhibit at London’s Science Museum called Top Secret: From Ciphers to Cyber Security, covering (or uncovering, as it were) some of the workings of Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters, better known as GCHQ (as you’d know if you were a fan, as I was, of the BBC series MI-5, 2002-11, which ran here on some PBS stations). 

[Frequent readers of ROT will know that I was a counterespionage special agent in the army, so this kind of article piques my attention and I have little memory flashes of my spook days in West Berlin.  Some readers will remember that Berlin was still under occupation by the four World War II allies—the British, the French, the Soviets, and us—until 1990, so I had frequent contact with our British counterparts (we were on less intimate terms with the French  forces in Berlin) and occasionally socialized with them.  We Yanks gained a little familiarity with the tradecraft of the British military intelligence methods and jargon.  

[I’ve written frequently on ROT about my life in MI and West Berlin, Spy Central in Europe during the Cold War.  Among the posts touching on or derived from that experience are “Berlin Station,” 19 and 22 July 2009; “Top Secret America,” 17 September 2010; “Berlin Memoir,” 16 December 2016, 20 January, 9 and 19 February, 11 and 29 March, and 13 April 2017; and “Who’s Who in CIA: A Cold War Relic,” 8 May 2018.

[Reading “Revealing Some Spy Secrets,” I was inspired to post two earlier Times reviews, reporting on two new museums here in New York City that cover different aspects of the espionage game.  Following the review of Top Secret are reviews of Spyscape, an immersive museum of spies, spying, and spycraft, and the K.G.B. Espionage Museum, which is exactly what the name implies.  So, don your cloaks and daggers and enjoy a little John Le Carré fantasy with me.]

 “Revealing Some Spy Secrets, but Not All”

by  Farah Nayeri

A British intelligence agency celebrates its centennial with a gadget-filled exhibition.

LONDON — The laptop — or what’s left of it — is a mangled carcass: Its innards have been ripped out, and only a few strips of metal and plastic remain. This was the MacBook Air that The Guardian used to store files leaked by the United States intelligence contractor Edward Snowden. Guardian employees destroyed the computer with power tools in July 2013 after the files on it were deemed a threat to British national security.

The destruction order came from the Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, a 100-year-old intelligence and security agency tasked with keeping Britain safe. The organization, which usually prefers to be under the radar, is celebrating its centenary with “Top Secret: From Ciphers to Cyber Security,” an exhibition of more than 100 objects at the Science Museum in London that runs through Feb. 23.

In addition to the laptop, the items on show include an encryption key used by Queen Elizabeth II to make sure her phone conversations weren’t tapped and a briefcase containing a clunky brown handset that Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher used for top-secret calls.

GCHQ is one of Britain’s most secret and secretive organizations: It wasn’t officially acknowledged in law until 1994. So why has it decided to appear in a London museum?

“We needed to tell our story, to be able to show the British people that this is what we do on their behalf,” said Tony Comer, the organization’s official historian. Part of the aim, he added, is to convince “those who really like solving problems that perhaps a career in GCHQ is the right thing for them.”

He said that the agency was “radically” rethinking how it can attract the intelligence operatives of tomorrow.

“It’s up to us to persuade them how cool it would be to work in a place like GCHQ,” Mr. Comer said.

“Top Secret” is cleverly crafted to appeal to audiences of all ages. Adults can learn about the everyday business of communications-based espionage and counterespionage, and children have a play area full of word and number games.

The exhibition’s richest sections, which are devoted to World War I, World War II and the Cold War, showcase the unwieldy contraptions used for espionage that could now be replaced by a desktop computer, a laptop or a smartphone.

One section focuses on the first downing of a German airship over Britain, which killed 16 crewmen, in September 1916. A vitrine displays the cutting-edge technology of the time that was used to spot the airship: a radio device fitted in a wooden, glass-fronted box, with knobs on top. Also on view are pieces of metal and fabric from the skin of the airship; and a cap, badge and boot that belonged to the German airmen.

A section about British intelligence services dismantled a Soviet spy network in 1961 recreates a home in suburban London, complete with 1960s-style floral wallpaper. It includes a radio transmitter that two spies from the ring concealed under their kitchen floor, and a cigarette lighter with a secret compartment for encryption codes.

Other sections allude to the use of satellites and online hacking in intelligence gathering.

The exhibition is “not necessarily dealing with a lot of stuff that’s contemporary,” said Elizabeth Bruton, the curator of communications at the Science Museum. GCHQ was “still a secret organization,” she added, “so even though we’ve worked closely with them for this exhibition, there are still things that they do that are kept secret.”

Stuart McKenzie, now a vice president at the Mandiant consulting arm of the cybersecurity company FireEye, worked for the British government for 11 years. He said the business of intelligence had not changed drastically since World War II. “People are still trying to break codes; people are still trying to get in and steal secrets,” he said. “Some of the tools have changed.”

As the world moves toward an “intellectual and thought-based economy, where intellectual property is the key,” Mr. McKenzie said, “protection of state secrets and organizations’ secrets is going to be the most important thing.”

In the modern-day cyber landscape, he said, Britain needs more than “a few people who’ve gone to Oxford and Cambridge,” so it made sense for GCHQ to reach out to a wider pool.

But were the show’s young visitors eager to join the cloak-and-dagger world of GCHQ?

Jake Drexler, 12, visiting from Los Angeles with his father, a gaming-industry executive, was busy solving a scrambled word puzzle on the exhibition’s opening day. He said the show was “fun” and that he liked the wartime displays.

“They had to keep telling each other codes, but without letting the other side know what was happening,” he said. “It was interesting how they figured out how to do that, and how they broke the codes on the other side.”

Did he want to become a spy when he grew up? “A spy, maybe not so much, but a code breaker, that would be cool,” he said. “I mean, it’s less risky.”

Colin Pilat, 11, who was visiting from Vaires-sur-Marne, France, with his parents and three siblings, voiced similar concerns.

There is “action and logic” in espionage, he said, but “it’s pretty dangerous — that’s the problem.” As a spy, he said, one could “get arrested for a long time, and there could be enemies, because you’re spying on someone, and these are dangerous people.”

He greeted the prospect of a future in espionage with a shrug. He said he’d rather be an architect.

[Top Secret: From Ciphers to Cyber Security runs through 23 February 2020 at the Science Museum, Exhibition Road, South Kensington, London, SW7 2DD; www.sciencemuseum.org.uk.]

*  *  *  *

“A Place to Come In From the Cold”

by William L. Hamilton

[This article appeared in the New York Times’ “Weekend Arts II” on 30 March 2018.  Spyscape is a private, for-profit espionage museum at 928 8th Avenue in the Times Square neighborhood of Manhattan (https://spyscape.com).  It opened in 2018. ]

What kind of spy are you? This museum tests your skills.

“Hello Bill Hamilton.” The silver kiosk displayed its welcome when I swiped the black wristband that was my admission ticket.

The days of slipping through the back of a tailor’s shop are long gone.

I was standing before the first of 12 information-gathering sentinels at Spyscape, a $50 million, 60,000-square-foot spying and espionage museum, which opened recently in mid-Manhattan.

With leading questions and embarrassing exercises, the kiosks were assessing me — personality traits, risk tolerance and I.Q. — to construct a profile of the kind of spy I might best be.

Spyscape is the newest unhidden headquarters of our cultural fascination with the art of deception, two levels inside a nondescript glass-box building on 8th Avenue at 55th Street. Its dark, labyrinthine interior landscape was designed by David Adjaye, the architect of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.

The kiosk would like me to agree or disagree with a few statements.

“I’ll say anything to get what I want,” it declared in a light tone of conspiracy. I gave that idea a dissembling 3 on a scale of 1 to 5, from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree.”

“I’m willing to be unethical if I believe it will help me succeed.” I squashed that with a 1. “I keep others at a distance.” Well, now that you mention it: 4.

“This is like dating,” I said to Aaron Moody, a visitor services associate.

In fact, espionage may be bigger than courtship on social media right now, with Facebook at the center of a growing controversy over the use of personal data during elections, and the park-bench poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter drawing international censure. Seismic private-information hacks reveal themselves with regularity, in government and business. We accept drone-patrolled, surveillance-prying public space. Cyber warfare has come of age, and the Cold War is back.

“Scary biscuits,” as the English say.

“I thought that spy stories were really a thing of the ’70s,” Mr. Adjaye said in an interview. “And here we are at this time, that actually spying is back.”

Asked how confident he was in the security of his own personal information, on a scale of 1 to 10 — with 10 being most secure — Mr. Adjaye said, “Three.”

What is it about the shadows of deception that excites our participation and not our fear? The International Spy Museum in Washington, with its impressive collection of spy artifacts, will be moving to a greatly expanded facility next year. A new National Museum of Intelligence and Special Operations, under development in Ashburn, Va., is expected to open in 2020.

Conceived as an entertainment attraction, Spyscape’s $39 experience ($32 for children ages 3 to 12 — bring them; you’ll need them) is a cultural chimera: part museum, part ride. It was created by Archimedia, a London-based private investment group that has been a developer in resorts, restaurants, and spy-themed film productions like the television adaptation of John le Carré’s “The Night Manager.”

Spyscape’s immersive experience begins in the outsize elevator, which makes a slow three-minute ascent. The Briefing Lift, as it’s called, delivers the visitor into Spyscape’s realm with a three-walled video created by Territory Studio in London, which worked on “Blade Runner 2049.”

The doors open; you have arrived at the 25-foot-high “city within a city,” as Mr. Adjaye calls the main floor: seven galleries presenting themes like encryption and special ops. In addition to a curated collection of objects, there are 141 live screens, 317 speakers, 113 live cameras and 32 projectors telling Spyscape’s stories. There are also games called “challenges” and the kiosks.

The stories are all real-life — no fictional spies like James Bond. The “Encryption” gallery tells the story of Alan Turing and Joan Clarke, the cryptanalysts of World War II, who cracked the German Enigma code; Virginia Hall in “Special Ops,” the woman with one leg who operated in occupied France and was called “the scourge of the Gestapo”; Edward Snowden in “Surveillance.” There is an actual Enigma machine, and a replica you can code on. “Encryption” closes with a present-day warning.

“The Enigma story shows no code is 100 percent foolproof.” And, “WikiLeaks revealed that the C.I.A. can’t break WhatsApp — yet. Every intelligence service is on the case trying to.”

Scary biscuits.

I am inside a black booth, facing a black-glass monitor. There is a heartbeat playing. Or are my ears pounding? Nick Ryan, a sound artist whose clients have included Tate Britain in London, designed Spyscape’s aural landscape, which is as originally and meticulously rendered as Mr. Adjaye’s architecture.

“Hello Bill Hamilton. Welcome to Deception.”

I am being tested for how well I lie and how well I detect lies. I stare at a grid on the monitor, which registers my face, and begins a live feed of me at the bottom. I put my fingertip on a red sensor, which takes my pulse.

“Have you ever been to space? What did you like about it?”

“Yes. It wasn’t New York,” I lie. The screen replays my face. My eyes are blinking like signal lamps.

“People blink more when lying,” the booth says empathetically. It knows I know I’ve failed.

Spyscape’s experience is mildly paranoiac, but it is never deadly dark. Its affirmative message — on T-shirts and tote bags — is “Question Everything.” Be your own information gatherer. Who would argue with that? There are no rendition programs or extraditions here. (Shelby Prichard, Spyscape’s chief of staff, who previously worked for the 9/11 Museum, said that the information gathered here was not shared externally or sold.)

In a timely way, Spyscape shows us what we know, but choose to ignore: that espionage and spying are not only the stuff of extraordinary tales or specialists’ tools. They are the “enemies among us” — the CCTVs, the closed-circuit tracking systems, the browser cookies. There is a double agent in every pocket. “Mobile phones are the most powerful spy devices of all,” the Briefing Lift explains.

Hakeen Betts, the retail associate who sold me John le Carré’s “The Pigeon Tunnel” in Spyscape’s exhaustive bookshop, told me that on a visit, his 10-year-old son was evaluated and told he was a “spymaster,” based on his performance with the interactivities.

All 10-year-olds are spymasters now. At the Encryption challenge, large horizontal touch screens, which look like naval charting tables, test your ability to grasp ciphers quickly. (It reminded me of dealing with an iOS update). A girl wearing a sparkling ballet skirt and sequined cat’s ears explained ciphers to her befuddled father: “Here’s how you do it.”

Swipe. “Hello Bill Hamilton.”

I am at the door of a laser tunnel. I step through. The tunnel is studded with unlighted buttons. I hit the red start button. “Welcome to Special Ops. Avoid the lasers. Good luck.”

The buttons turn bright white. Smoke hisses in. Loud music, with a “There he is — grab him!” mania to it. The tunnel is now a spider’s web of laser beams. I have 90 seconds to punch as many buttons as I can, deactivating them, without hitting a laser beam, which deducts 5 seconds from the running clock. I break into a sweat so hard I can hear it. And that’s the last thing I remember.

Two men rolled out laughing from other tunnels. Competing in side-by-side chambers, they scored a 165 and a 140. I am the spy who came in from the cold, really slowly. 95.

Spyscape’s last chamber is Debrief. On the black-screened walls, streams of information glow. Visitors are given their analyses and told what spy roles they might play.

My screen says some conciliatory things, a kind of ‘‘you were second on the list, really” that I recognize from human resources officers.

“You take risks after careful consideration.” Thank you. “You are mathematical.” Uh, ok. It’s never seen my SATs. “You are very precise in your work.” Nice — tell my editor.

“Bill Hamilton, you are a cryptologist.”

In three tries, over three visits, I am repeatedly a cryptologist, passed over for ‘‘intelligence operative,’’ ‘‘spycatcher’’ and other action roles I coveted. No rooftop motorcycle chases, perfect cocktails or brand placement. A desk job. If I couldn’t crack my own code, how good could I be?

Michael Amendola, an assistant theater producer I met in the gift shop, told me Spyscape had decided he was a “hacker” — a risk-taker. He praised the museum’s immersive nature.

“I loved the code breaking, I loved the laser exhibition,” Mr. Amendola said, adding that he learned a great deal, too. He compared Spyscape to a recent visit to the Museum of Sex on lower Fifth Avenue. “It’s an interesting concept,” Mr. Amendola said of MoSex, “but I thought it felt a little underwhelming.”

If you can beat sex, you’re in like Flint.

[Or Matt Helm, or Maxwell Smart, or Napoleon Solo, or Illya Kuryakin . . . or Special Agent Rick, MI.  Sorry.  Had a little flashback there.  I’m back now.

[“Secret agent man, secret agent man / They’ve given you a number and taken away your name.”]

*  *  *  *

“A Peek Into Soviet Secrets”

by Sopan Deb

[This review was published in the “Arts” section of the New York Times on 22 January 2019.  The K.B.G. Espionage Museum opened in January 2019.]

The K.G.B. Spy Museum opens a door into espionage.

“This is a Bulgarian umbrella; have you heard about this one?” Agne Urbaityte asked, pointing to a blue umbrella behind a glass case. There was a needle peeking out from the top.

“It’s a weapon umbrella,” she said. “You press the button here, you see the needle, the needle goes out and shoots a small shot of ricin poison. It’s still the most harsh poison in the world.”

Thank goodness this was not the real thing. It was the kind of tool famously used to kill the Bulgarian dissident author Georgi Markov on Waterloo Bridge in 1978, roughly a decade after he defected to the West. Many have speculated since that the K.G.B. was involved.

Ms. Urbaityte, 29, was standing against a wall Wednesday at the recently opened K.G.B. Spy Museum in Chelsea, a warehouse-type space housing what Ms. Urbaityte said are thousands of artifacts documenting the rise of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, or in plain English: the Committee for State Security. Or more familiarly: the K.G.B., the Soviet Union’s intelligence agency and secret police.

The museum opens at a time when Russian intelligence services have been at the forefront of both pop culture and current events. “The Americans,” the FX show about a married couple who spied for the Soviet Union in Washington, has been a cultural phenomenon. It won a Golden Globe this year for best television drama. (Another popular TV show, “Homeland,” has had Russian antagonists.)

In a news story that seemed as if it were straight out of “The Americans,” in December, Maria Butina, a 30-year-old Russian, pleaded guilty to one charge of conspiring to act as a foreign agent. As part of a deal with prosecutors, she acknowledged that Russian officials were behind her efforts. Last year a former Russian spy was poisoned with a deadly nerve agent in Salisbury, England, drawing international outrage. Prime Minister Theresa May said it was “highly likely” that Russia was behind the attack.

And a newly released K.G.B. archive has revealed the names of 4,141 Latvians who might have been secret informants for the Soviets.

But this museum, Ms. Urbaityte said, is apolitical.

“It’s historical and about technological progress; you cannot erase facts from history,” she said in an interview, sitting next to her father, Julius Urbaitis, 55. They are the co-curators of the new institution.

The Spy Museum is the culmination of three decades worth of collecting by Mr. Urbaitis, he said. He first had an interest in World War II artifacts, but when he acquired a listening device that belonged to Adolf Hitler, he became fascinated with espionage, he said. The family hails from Lithuania, where they founded a museum in 2014 called Atomic Bunker — which was actually based in an old nuclear bunker.

“My dad has a collector’s spirit,” Ms. Urbaityte said.

Some of the objects from Atomic Bunker have migrated to Chelsea. About half of the items in the collection, a combination of original artifacts and copies, are owned by the father-daughter duo. The other half were acquired separately by the curators. Ms. Urbaityte and Mr. Urbaitis do not own the museum, which is private and for-profit. The owners have chosen to remain anonymous.

The museum doesn’t shy away from depicting the harsh tactics of the K.G.B. Far from it: There are interactive exhibits, like a model of a chair used for interrogations.

“If people want to, we can tie them up,” Ms. Urbaityte deadpanned.

The tour starts with a mock-up of a chief officer’s work space. A mannequin wearing a K.G.B. chief officer’s uniform is at a desk with a flag of Soviet Russia behind him. To the mannequin’s left sits a bronze desk lamp, which, according to the curators, sat in a villa belonging to the former Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. Nearby, Russian propaganda posters cover a wall. One of the oldest items in the space is a switchboard from 1928. Its operator was almost always recruited by the N.K.V.D., the Russian secret police and a forerunner of the K.G.B., according to a description of the item.

There are also original doors from a K.G.B. prison housed at the back of the museum. The accompanying information reads: “People who did not take psychologically the interrogation process well were put into soft cells. Then people were given various medications to turn from a politically idealistic person into a vegetable.”

Many of the exhibits are dedicated to showing exactly how the K.G.B. carried out business, particularly surveillance. Several glass displays show where K.G.B. agents would embed lenses and bugs: in rings, watches, belt buckles, cuff links, dishes, among other places.

This isn’t the only spy museum in the United States, of course. There is Spyscape, which opened early last year on Eighth Avenue at 55th Street. And Washington has the International Spy Museum. The National Museum of Intelligence and Special Operations is in development and is slated to open next year in Ashburn, Va.

As we finished up our tour, I couldn’t help but ask: Had the curators seen “The Americans?” After all, some of the devices in the museum were likely visible onscreen in the show.

“It is precise and it’s good and we loved it,” Ms. Urbaityte said.

Ms. Urbaityte added that Vitali Baganov, who played the role of Stepan in four episodes of “The Americans,” had stopped by the museum recently to offer his support. Mr. Baganov also appeared in “The Sopranos” as Valery, the Russian who disappears in one of the show’s most famous episodes, “Pine Barrens.” He recorded a one-minute video on behalf of the budding institution, calling it “fantastic.”

“Creates an atmosphere of really unique K.G.B. past,” Mr. Baganov says.

The museum has hired tour guides for the space — a guided walk-through costs $43.99. But if you want to stroll around yourself, it will cost $25 for adults and $20 for students and people age 65 and up. Children under 6 enter for free. The curators want audiences to get their money’s worth: Mr. Urbaitis said he and his daughter want the museum “to blow their minds.”

[K.G.B. Espionage Museum is located at 245 West 14th Street (east of 8th Avenue), Manhattan; it’s open from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. daily; https://kgbspymuseum.org.]

"Focusing on 'Mean Girls'"

by Sopan Deb

[“Focusing on ‘Mean Girls’” describes the process actress Jennifer Simard went through when she took over the parts played in the new Broadway musical, based on the 2004 movie that opened on 8 April, by Kerry Butler, who opened in the original cast.  Originally published in the “Arts” section of the New York Times of 13 September 2018, Sopan Deb’s report falls into the category of articles I like to post occasionally that spotlight lesser-known aspects of stage production—the parts of show business that audiences seldom know about or even think of when they're sitting in the house enjoying a performance.  A number of years ago (on 28 November 2015), I posted an article from the Washington Post, “Broadway’s Anonymous Stars” by Peter Marks, that focused on actors who replaced stars of Broadway shows.  Deb’s report is an apt follow-up, depicting the work of a “utility” player (Simard, who joined  the cast on stage on 11 September, covers three roles) rather than a star.]

It was Jennifer Simard’s first day of work. Propping her elbows on a railing behind the audience in the back of the August Wilson Theater, she peered through binoculars, purchased just hours before so she could get a really close-up look at what was happening on stage during this Tuesday night performance of “Mean Girls.”

She squinted. What equation was the calculus teacher writing? Where did she put her marker? How did she then weave through the students during a dance number?

That teacher, Ms. Norbury, was one of three drastically different roles Ms. Simard would soon inhabit. She had quite a bit of catching up to do as she embarked on one of the unheralded journeys in theater — joining the established ensemble of a Broadway musical well after it opens.

“It’s my job to enter into this well-oiled machine as seamlessly as possible, almost like a ghost,” she explained.

Where her fellow cast members had months to master their parts, Ms. Simard had exactly two weeks to learn the staging for characters previously played by Kerry Butler. (The others: the mothers of queen bee Regina George and nice girl Cady Heron.) That included only one full rehearsal with the whole cast — called a “put-in” — that comes at the end of the process.

A perpetually sunny 48, Ms. Simard didn’t seem especially fazed; after all, her Broadway debut in 2007 was as a replacement in “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.”

She allowed a reporter to follow her during key moments — including an expert comedic consultation — as she got ready to face the Plastics, culminating in her first performance on Tuesday night.

Watch Carefully

Ms. Simard had finished her run as Ernestina in “Hello, Dolly” in March and was in rehearsal for a summer production of “Annie” in St. Louis when she read for “Mean Girls.” A hit show, it promised to be steady work.

She auditioned on July 2. A little more than two weeks later, she got the part.

She knew the basics of the script, having been part of a reading of the musical in 2016 during its development, and immediately got to work by memorizing her lines even before her contract began.

“It’s not a lot of time,” she said. “You can’t really play and find the beats you need as an actor with your script in your hand for very long.”

On Aug. 28, her first official day, she was fitted for 10 costumes, and started vocal rehearsals.

For an actor, joining a show, rather than originating a character, means your creative choices are narrowed. There’s less to discover when you’re plugged in to an existing machine.

To John MacInnis, the associate choreographer of “Mean Girls,” who would be working with Ms. Simard, that limitation can be a blessing.

“I personally think getting thrown into a show is a lot easier than going through the whole process from the beginning because everyone is concentrating on you,” he said. “You’re the main focus.”

For Ms. Simard, the most essential task was simple: watching the show as often as possible.

Rehearsal time is limited, so it’s key for performers to learn as much about blocking, choreography, how cast members navigate the stage space and other minutiae through visual osmosis.

Thus the binoculars. And, on Ms. Simard’s second night at the theater, a stopwatch, which allowed her to notate her script with timings for costume changes and transitions.

Finding Your Place(s)

During days, Ms. Simard worked on scenes and choreography mostly in a rehearsal room away from the theater. There was also a day built in for photography.

On Sept. 6, Ms. Simard was at the August Wilson with other actors and members of the creative team, including Mr. MacInnis. This is typical, especially for a musical with its many moving parts; new cast members are trained by key deputies, not the creative leaders.

To rehearse blocking without the whole cast present — that would be a costly commitment, given union rules — performers have to memorize a virtual grid, with zero at the center of the stage.

Ms. Simard’s transitions included moving a desk on and off the stage at the end of one dance-heavy musical number. If she was in the wrong spot a colleague could get hurt.

She looked tentative as she ran through her dance moves on stage. But with each run-through she seemed to be soaking it in.

Becca Petersen, the assistant dance captain, is responsible for knowing every dance move for every cast member. She and Mr. MacInnis guided Ms. Simard through “Do This Thing” and “I See Stars,” the final two big production numbers.

“Do This Thing” ends with Kyle Selig, who plays Cady’s love interest, essentially belly-flopping directly in front of Ms. Simard. After one pass, she asked Mr. MacInnis if her spacing was correct: “I just want to make sure he has room to get around me.”

“There’s a lot of traffic,’’ she explained afterward. “You have to make sure you’re not hurting anybody. Safety first, you know?”

Getting Notes From the Source

Ms. Simard was the only performer in costume at the put-in on Sept. 7. It was four days before show time and, along with everything else, she needed to rehearse her 10 costume changes in real time.

As a gesture of good will, she ordered a box of soft pretzels for the entire cast. She was a bundle of jittery energy, her nervousness not helped by the fact that Tina Fey, who wrote the book for the show and played Ms. Norbury in the 2004 film, was there to watch.

Cast members not in Ms. Simard’s scenes frequently burst into applause when she came on stage or executed a successful number. Casey Hushion, the associate director, occasionally strolled up to the stage to adjust Ms. Simard’s spacing.

It wasn’t completely smooth — Ms. Simard stumbled on a few lines — but afterward she said she felt exactly where she needed to be. In a chat with the music director, Mary-Mitchell Campbell, Ms. Simard compared the one-and-done rehearsal to her wedding day: “Pay attention because it’s going to be a blur.”

Ms. Fey had some notes. One of Ms. Simard’s characters, Mrs. George, absolutely wants to be part of the Plastics, the shallow, popular and occasionally cruel trio of high school girls at the center of the show. But Ms. Fey reminded the actress that she wants to be a good mother, too.

In 2016, Ms. Simard was nominated for a Tony Award playing a gambling-addicted nun in the spoofy musical “Disaster!” Her big number had her virtually making out with a slot machine.

She’s not afraid of physical comedy. And Ms. Fey’s notes included a bit of encouragement. She particularly liked how Ms. Simard was clutching Mrs. George’s puppet dog in one of her scenes.

“Maybe,’’ Ms. Simard reported, thinking out loud, “it’s going to lick my neck in the end?”

It’s Show Time

On Tuesday, Sept. 11, hours before she was to make her “Mean Girls” debut, Ms. Simard got pointers for the first time from Casey Nicholaw, the show’s director and choreographer.

Referring to her first scene as Mrs. Heron, Mr. Nicholaw suggested that she “warm her up a little bit.” But mostly he was full of praise. “You have the best musical theater face ever,” he said. He ended the rehearsal by punctuating his encouragement: “You’re going to be so [clap] good [clap] tonight [clap].”

Minutes before going on stage, Ms. Simard was in the wings as fellow cast members hugged her and wished her good luck. “I feel ready,” she said, staring intently at the stage.

Bernadette Peters — her former “Hello, Dolly” colleague — was in the audience to see her. And backstage, the crew had laid out boxes of Tic Tacs that were specially labeled “I’m a Pusher,” a reference to one of Ms. Simard’s lines.

There was one early hiccup. As Ms. Norbury, that equation-writing calculus teacher, Ms. Simard skipped a few lines, throwing off the timing of an entrance for Erika Henningsen, as Cady.

In her dressing room right just afterward Ms. Simard took the blame. “It makes for a funny story — later,” she said.

Speaking of which, she also had a triumph: Her approach to Mrs. George’s first scene with the puppet dog earned her exit applause as she walked offstage.

She would remember to keep it in. It was time to leave the theater and go to bed. After all, she had two shows the next day.