A very British hit, Operation Mincemeat lands on Broadway

Last year, hit West End musical “Operation Mincemeat” launched a naughty promotional campaign. “Are we too British for Broadway?” For example, we invited Americans through its mailing list and social media to fill out an online survey on whether they had trouble understanding British accents. (“No,” said 90.2% of respondents.)

After winning an Olivier Award for the best new musical and crossing the ocean, The Show is a screwball comedy about the World War I spy business, opening at Broadway's Golden Theatre on March 20th. That long preview period is that it gives you plenty of time to adapt to a particular sensibility of New York viewers.

Some of the things the cast and crew found were amazing, director Robert Hasty said.

“The show has always grown and developed from something that was kind enough to give back to the audience,” he told the crowd. “If we have any thoughts when we leave tonight, we're really, really grateful.”

Operation Mincemeat was a 1943 Sleight-of Hand Spy mission where the British dressed their bodies as royal marines, equipped with a false invasion plan designed to hide the true intentions of their allies, dumped them into the sea, and was discovered by the Nazis. Its musical version took a fascinating trajectory in London and settled in the West End Fortune Theatre, which is still being performed since opening in 2019 at the small new diorama theatre.

What Hasty has learned from previous audiences: First, there is no need for Broadway theatres to walk through the long historic exposition. “I'm amazed at how lean audience this is,” he said. “They want the story to be told more about ri-about so we took a few lines here and there.”

“American audiences are quick and refined, but I also love stupid things like slapstick and physical comedy,” Hasty said. This brought Comic Mayhem's Ratchet in several scenes, including briefcases that may or may not contain guilty documents.

The production, written and composed by the comedy group SpitLip, features five actors playing a total of 82 characters. Three actors – David Cumming, Natasha Hodgson and Zoeroburts are part of Spitlip. Not the other two, Jack Malone and Claire Marie Hall. (Fourth Spitlip member, Felix Hagan, will not perform on the show.) The original cast follows the show to New York.

Having an original cast of performer writers with comedy backgrounds has become an unusually agile production as the actors can rewrite the lines and reconstruct the scene itself. In previous iterations of the show, they often remake things on the spot, but as it's on Broadway, it's no longer feasible.

They were coming to New York and preparing to treat the audience as “the sixth member of the cast.”

“If there are lines that don't work, the reference that doesn't work, the moment we feel it's not fully landed – if it's difficult to understand – we're ready and want to wear our old boots again and make new changes,” Hodgson said.

The change is small and inserted at various points of irrational cultural differences. “Public Schools” (schools with several main characters attended, like Eton) have been changed to “private schools.”

References to “Flemming” (a musical character, like Ian Fleming, author of the James Bond Spy novel) was sharpened to include his name. And the British shorthand for the Prime Minister's Office, Number 10, has been changed to a more recognizable “Downing Street.”

Finally, the voiceover setting the scene that opens the show was tweaked to point out that the story is in fact true. “A lot of Americans didn't realize it was a true story because it was fantastical,” said John Today, the musical's lead producer.

In London, productions enjoy an extraordinarily intimate relationship with their fans. The most passionate thing known as the Mincefluencers is known to appear in theaters where they cosplay the “Mincemeat” character. Many people have seen production dozens of times and can recite every line.

An estimated 300 Mincefluencers flew to New York for their first preview. After the song, there was a loud cheer, and the noise occasionally owned the actors who were trying to continue the show. Fans then waited for the cast to appear outside the Golden, before exploding the full rendition of “Sail on, Boys,” a song from “Mincemeat” on 45th Avenue.

The song was heard through the walls in the theater where the production team was holding post-show meetings. “Bloody hell,” Hasty said. “Is this normal on Broadway? They just repeat the show on the street?”

With about 800 seats, Golden is nearly twice the size of its 435-seat property, the London venue for the show, but the stage footprint is the same. That is, production did not require timing adjustments. Planned in the moment for scenes and costume changes. “Some of the costume changes are very fast,” Malone said. (That's an understatement.)

Real-life tactics have been previously portrayed in other media, including Ben McIntyre's 2010 book and the 2022 Netflix film starring Colin Firth and Matthew McFadien. But its absurdity and boldness make it a fascinating tasty object, but it seemed like a distant, ridiculous, and even ridiculous idea for musical comedy.

Hodgson was first heard about it on a family vacation when his younger brother Jo told her about an episode of a podcast that piqued his interest. “He said, 'I'm hearing stories that should be a musical,'” Hodgson said. Spitlip had been writing for a while, but not commercial success, and Hodgson could not imagine doing a show about war. “I was like, 'Shut up, Joe.' ”

But she was captivated by hearing the episode anyway. “I couldn't believe how crazy and confused the story was,” she said. “It was a mission in World War II, but I said, 'Who cares? It's a raves of amazing spies with a huge heart at the heart,” she said.

The group made two important decisions early on. One: The story contains a crowd, but the cast is limited to only five people who play all parts. (Hats and mustaches do a lot of work.) 2: They stick to the “gender blown” cast that they used in their previous Spitlip work. Sometimes men play women and women play men. Otherwise, they don't.

“If you could play a police officer, why not play a man?” Among other parts, Zoe Roberts, who plays MI5 official Johnny Beban, said he is directing the operation. It was possible to send male overconfidence by portraying conceited upper class men who coordinated British war efforts. “In the hands of female performers, roles become commentary on power structures,” she said.

Similarly, the role of Hester, an elderly secretary – the show stop part with heartbreaking songs about loss and grief – was written specifically for male actors and performed by Malone. It helped him win the Olivier Award in 2024 for the best supporting actor in a musical.

Oddly, the gender of an actor doesn't feel like a big deal when watching a show. “Gender is a hot topic and there are generations of people who are afraid of that conversation,” Hodgson said. “We wanted this to be a place where it could be lightly touched, and gender melted, and people who didn't understand might come and see it being alien and unterrifying.”

At least at this singular historic moment, there is one more thing director Hasty noticed about the New York audience. It's a craving for an opportunity to animate World War II and affirm the principles of democracy that quietly supports production. Usually, “Dasübermensch” and “Dasübermensch”, which feature a stylish Nazi dressed cast, perform purely for laughs, just as “Hitler's Spring for the Spring” does with “Producer.”

But something has changed in New York, Hasty said, and the audience cheers and praises them, not as humorous as the opportunity to condemn what the Nazis represent.

“The show really hits the audience elsewhere,” he said. “It's not just because of differences in nationality and culture, but because the world is changing really fast.”

There is a sense from the audience that “they are evil, democracy, freedom, important, so we want to defeat those people.” “It's a music comedy, but it's something people really invest in.”