Broadway review by Adam Feldman
The scrappy British musical Operation Mincemeat, the comic tale of a military spy plot in World War II, has arrived to storm the shores of Broadway with plenty of backup. Critics in the U.K. have loved it; it has been billed as “the best-reviewed show in West End history”—Time Out London’s own Andrzej Lukowski called it “a glorious spoof”—and it won the 2024 Olivier Award for Best New Musical. The show is the debut offering of a young comedy-theater troupe called SpitLip, which has been performing variations of it since 2019, and local critics were clearly rooting for it. (“It’s really hard to be anything but delighted for the company,” wrote Lukowski. “This is very much their triumph.”) Perhaps, in riding this wave of praise to Broadway, the production has lost some of what made the operation itself an unlikely success in 1943: the element of surprise.
Operation Mincemeat | Photograph: Courtesy Julieta Cervantes
Like Six, the show is an irreverent look at English history, devised by university chums, that worked its way up from the Edinburgh Fringe to the West End; like Dead Outlaw, which will also open on Broadway this season, it features a small cast playing multiple roles, and centers on the unusual use of a human corpse. In this case, the subject is the real-life Operation Mincemeat, which also inspired a 2022 film drama of the same name: a bold ruse, devised by the intelligence agency MI5, to plant false intelligence on the body of a homeless man disguised as a downed and drowned pilot in the ocean off the southern coast of Spain. Which is to say: A plane in Spain feigns falling in the main, and the dead man’s briefcase contains supposedly secret plans for an Allied invasion of Sardinia, when the Allies are actually planning to invade Sicily.
The cast of five, often playing against gender, includes three of Operation Mincemeat’s writer-composers as the scheme’s primary architects: Natasha Hodgson as the glib toff Ewen Montagu, David Cumming as the gawky savant Charles Cholmondeley and Zoë Roberts as Johnny Bevan, their sturdy commanding officer. (The show’s other author is Felix Hagan.) Two other actors join them as the story’s main women: Jak Malone as Bevan’s reserved assistant Hester Leggatt and Claire-Marie Hall as her ambitious secretarial poolmate Jean Leslie, a self-described “plucky young heroine” type. In one of the show’s residual Fringe elements, these actors also literally wear many different hats—courtesy of designer Ben Stones, who is also behind the deliberately makeshift set—to play all the other roles: Cockneys in flat caps, sailors in beanies, office girls in colored bows.
Operation Mincemeat | Photograph: Courtesy Julieta Cervantes
In keeping with the show’s madcap transhistorical style, the songs are a motley assortment of pastiches from Vaudeville to modern pop. They’re pleasingly familiar—“Sail on, Boys” is a sea shanty with a whiff of “The Rose,” “Make a Man” is 1940s swing by way of the cantina band in Star Wars—and verbally clever in tossed-off ways, with a Tim Minchin–ish spatter of near-rhymes (“It’s time for ambition / Time to show we’ve got vision / We’re the best brains in Britain”) and expressly Hamiltonian passages of rap. A cast album has been recorded, and Operation Mincemeat is enjoyable to listen to in that form. And director Robert Hastie certainly gives everyone plenty of comic business to keep the show active onstage. It’s one big Hastie pudding.
So why, in person, did Operation Mincemeat mostly leave me less amused than I’d hoped—and even, at times, annoyed? Humor is subjective, of course, and at the performance I attended, much of the audience seemed to like it a great deal more than I did. Where you come down on this question probably has to do with your tolerance for high-effort physical comedy. Perhaps a test is in order. Take a look at this photograph, which accurately captures the tone of much of the production:
Operation Mincemeat | Photograph: Courtesy Julieta Cervantes
If this looks to you like actors having fun, there’s a good chance you’ll dig what Operation Mincemeat is grinding. To me, it looks like actors pushing too hard. They don’t stop nudging you with their elbows, and while moments of that can tickle—I smiled more than once at Hodgson’s bluff obliviousness—two and a half hours of it gets a little exhausting. (Cumming, in particular, mugs at a level of unrelenting mania that would make Jerry Lewis say, “Take it down a notch.”) The show has been compared to Monty Python, but it’s sweatier than that. The brilliance of a Python sketch like “The Ministry of Silly Walks” is the absurdist normalcy that surrounds the central oddity; here, the characters always seem to know they’re walking silly. (It has also been compared to The Producers, since both contain irreverent musical portrayals of the Nazis. But the bad taste of the “Springtime for Hitler” sequence in that show was the comedy’s target; Operation Mincemeat’s Nazi bits—an electronic dance-pop number called “Das Übermensch,” a spinning-swastika propeller—are simply bad-taste comedy itself.)
Some of the things that bothered me about Operation Mincemeat are inherent to the material, such as the way it builds Jean’s arc as a feminist parable (starting with her defiant Six-ish pop number, “All the Ladies”) but actually gives her almost nothing to do but take notes. And some things probably just don’t land as well here as in London, such as the show’s preoccupation with class or its general tendency—true to many British musicals—to call attention to itself as a musical. Yet I can’t help suspecting that something has been lost in this production’s trip across the ocean. Maybe, after five years, the actors’ gameness has gone a bit gamy; maybe, too, they have overenlarged their performances to fill the space. (Though one of Broadway’s cozier venues, the Golden is still about twice as large as the West End’s Fortune Theatre.)
Operation Mincemeat | Photograph: Courtesy Julieta Cervantes
What I do know is that the performer who comes across best is the one who seems the least forced: Jak Malone, who not only provides the show’s best mincing—as a campy fraudulent coroner bedecked in sequined blood—but also, by far, its meatiest dramatic moment: the Act I ballad “Dear Bill,” in which Hester imagines a letter to the fictitious downed airman from his fictitious sweetheart, and which rings truer in feeling than anything else in the show. It’s this musical’s equivalent of 1776’s “Mama, Look Sharp”: a sincere respite from the busy bickering of people making the big decisions, sung from the perspective of the people whose lives are changed by them. As Malone delivers it, with beautiful directness in a wistful high tenor, the troubles of the real world take center stage and the troubles of the show melt away. Like Hester herself, it’s the quietly beating heart of the whole operation.
Operation Mincemeat. John Golden Theatre (Broadway). Book, music and lyrics by David Cumming, Felix Hagan, Natasha Hodgson and Zoë Roberts. Directed by Robert Hastie. With Cumming, Hodgson, Roberts, Jak Malone, Claire-Marie Hall. Running time: 2hrs 35mins. One intermission.
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Operation Mincemeat | Photograph: Courtesy Julieta Cervantes
