The audience at Broadway’s Golden Theater was merrily losing its mind. Onstage, actors were frenziedly passing round a briefcase and landline phones. As the zaniness increased, the laughter got louder. For the creators and cast of the musical Operation Mincemeat, these effusive reactions are not only welcome, but also a relief. The true story of a convoluted, life-saving Second World War plan to fool Hitler may be a West End hit, but, as with any British theatrical export, the question is: will Americans get it? The early audience answer for Mincemeat seems to be yes; New York critics’ verdicts will be revealed on the opening night, this week.
“We’re having an absolute blast,” says Natasha Hodgson, one of five performers — alongside David Cumming, Claire-Marie Hall, Jak Malone and Zoë Roberts — playing the real-life British military figures, and a dizzying array of other characters, who plotted to use a corpse to deceive the Nazis over the Allied invasion of Sicily in 1943.
Roberts recalls practicing a dance move in front of a poster on Cumming’s kitchen wall, using whatever reflection she could glean because he didn’t own a mirror. “If someone then had said to me, ‘This show is going to Broadway,’ it would have seemed wild.” She hopes its success underlines the necessity of British arts funding; without it, she said, Mincemeat would not exist.
The performers tell me that celebrities including Steven Spielberg, Matthew Broderick and Daniel Radcliffe have already seen the show. Its dedicated army of fans — the “Mincefluencers”— greeted an early performance by bringing the street outside the theater to a standstill, serenading cast and crew with one of the show’s key songs. The director, Robert Hastie, points out that the Mincefluencers revel in formulating plans in the eccentric spirit of the real-life characters of Charles Cholmondeley (Cumming), Jean Leslie (Hall), Ewen Montagu (Hodgson), Hester Leggatt (Malone), and Johnny Bevan (Roberts) in the show.
Mincemeat’s gender fluidity, with women playing men and men playing women, provides an alternative lens with which to view power and relationships — especially in Hodgson’s scene-chomping depiction of Montagu. The gender-blurring is not played for laughs. Cumming says the show is “quietly queer. We want it to be a safe space for anyone who is different.”
Mincemeat is truly the little engine that could. Hodgson, who first heard about the real-life Operation Mincemeat via the Stuff You Should Know podcast, sent it to Cumming, Roberts and Felix Hagan, her SpitLip theater company co-founders. They then read the Times columnist and Air Mail contributor Ben Macintyre’s 2010 book, then read Montagu’s 1953 book, The Man Who Never Was, then watched the latter’s 1956 film adaptation.
SpitLip debuted the musical in 2019 at the 80-seat New Diorama in London, moving to the West End in 2023. At last year’s Olivier Awards, Mincemeat won best new musical, while Malone — who sings the bravura showstopper “Dear Bill” — won the best supporting actor, musical award.
That song — about love, separation and loss — strikes a serious note amid the ribaldry. As do other moments highlighting fascism and sexism, and a final scene celebrating the true, unacknowledged hero of the story. Elsewhere the musical skewers authoritarianism in a raucous number that combines Nazis, boy bands and K-pop.
Hastie says the New York audience is more voluble than the British, which might be down to America’s historic love of slapstick, Buster Keaton, the Marx Brothers and Charlie Chaplin. Basic stage moves that pass unnoticed in the UK result in “absolute howling” in the States. Hastie thinks audiences delight “in watching two crazy endeavors simultaneously”: the mission of the real-life “Mincemeat” characters alongside the cast’s manically speedy character and costume changes. As the show has grown, the challenge, Cumming says, is to “maintain the charm and engine of its origin, which is five people being silly with hats.”
When the production makes serious points about fascism, an audible rumble of recognition by those less than enamored with Trump’s second term ripples through the Golden Theater. To let that moment breathe, the cast have deleted a moment of levity that usually breaks it.
Other changes —“public schoolboys” has become “private schoolboys”— are intended to ward off transatlantic linguistic confusion. An opening statement outlining the show’s basis in history was added because Hastie kept hearing that many Americans thought it so nuts it had to be fiction.
After their Olivier wins, to be nominated for any Tony Awards (announced on May 1) would be the “icing on an already quite fancy cake”, Cumming says.
“We’re very aware this isn’t our turf, our town,” Hodgson adds. “It already feels we’re in a dream movie version of our lives.”
Operation Mincemeat is on at the Golden Theatre in New York
Tim Teeman is a senior editor and writer at the Daily Beast
