Mirren’s Cool Queen Upstaged by Corgis; Minnelli Shines

Shakespeare gave us a queen driven to murder and madness. Racine gave us a queen whose incestuous longings ended in suicide. Peter Morgan’s Queen Elizabeth II drinks tea.

Since the beginning of her reign in 1952, the queen has continued the royal tradition of short weekly informal meetings with prime ministers. The monarch’s role is to gain information and offer advice. Morgan’s play “The Audience,” starring Helen Mirren in London, takes an educated and often amusing guess at the content of some of those meetings.