“Operation Mincemeat” review: The hard one that saved Europe

In 1943, in wartime England, a homeless person died in the street after ingesting mouse poison. Given the false post-death identity by the British anti-intellectual officer, there is no effort to find his family – he was dressed in military uniform, sealed with a cooler and kicked out of a submarine near the Spanish coast. The paper planted in his corpse eventually heads to Hitler, and, in fact, plans to do so in Sicily, convinced him that the allies would launch a European invasion in Sardinia. As a result, the axle forces are converted to the wrong Italian island.

In short, just as this real world war project was called a work, the Mincemeat mission.

But is that interesting?

“Operation Mincemeat” depends heavily on your answer to that question, whether it's a nasty musical comedy about planning. It hit London, came to Broadway, opened at Golden Theatre on Thursday, paying close attention to the differences in accents, dialects and use between British and American audiences. (There are private schools in public schools.) But it seems that the author, the group called Spitlip, and director Robert Hastie, also gave us plenty of thought about our various senses of humor.

You will recognize it. Combine Oxbridge snoot with Pan Rival Dory to create a self-cancelling middle brow snark. It can be detected in Monty Python, Benny Hill's show DNA elements, “The Play That Mopping,” and “The 39 Steps,” Hitchcock Stage Sprofof. But if these effects made you laugh, you might still experience a reduction in returns with non-stop tickling of “Operation Mincemeat” as much as they made me. Python kept his satire sharp and his sketches fast.

That's not the case here. It's over two and a half hours and the show is barely big. Its purpose is also not so scattered, so it's clear what it's satirizing.

At first, it seems they want to laugh at the public school toffs and dull brass in Mi5, the institution that developed the plan. They are offered as idiots, freaks, excess snobs. In the show's first song, “Born To Lead,” Ewen Montagu (Natasha Hodgson) explains that “Fortune stands for what I have of courage and good fortune.” His colleague Charles Cholmondry (David Cumming) is a tense Nelly, an amateur entomologist with stolen eyes behind his big round glasses, looking like a cartoon click beetle. The main feature of their colonel, Johnny Bevan (Zo Roberts), is that he is spising a comparative word.

But when you think the show will become a long variation on the Python's stupid walk ministry, it resonates with another target: the male foolishness towards women. Jean Leslie (Clair Marie Hall), hired to serve tea, leads other “girls” in Beyoncé's tribute, called “all women” when it comes to making the most of their employment opportunities now that the boys aren't fighting. But women are also satirized and presented as opportunists.

This is before reaching the celebrity coroner who offers “old lady” in “adolescents/every phase of corruption,” and at the top of Act 2, it is complete with a “producer” homage (choreography by Jenny Arnold) and a Swastika propeller, known as “Das Eubermensch.” James Bond creator Ian Fleming worked as a Navy Intelligence agent on the project, but he was also involved in the ribs. The flashy finale, known as the “fantastic finale,” mainly enjoys the musical theatre itself.

These are undoubtedly all worthy targets, but they tend to target them in roughly the same way, regardless of how valuable they are. Similarly, as the show changes from topic to topic, the song mainly stays in one place. Most are rap and persevering rhythmic dities. It's great for solos, but it's choral readable, especially when the rhymes are very vague. (“Moscow” and “Crossbow” were clinging to my ears.) Tiny orchestration on keyboards, basses and drums is useless.

You can leave it with the “Mincemeat Operation”. Show is about to become something that isn't like the corpse of a borrowed uniform. (I think it's intentional that the sets and outfits by Ben Stones look cheap.) But sometimes, in a tiresome joy, the author of Spitlip (Cumming, Hodson, Roberts, Felix Hagan) has proven to be far more capable. Unexpectedly, the character who looks like a stock figure – Doudi Matron, defeating the girl in charge of her – appears as a richer and better person, raising the show with her.

She is Hester Legat and is performed in the Music Hall Drag Tradition by Jacque Malone. (Gender is a rotating door as all five actors sketch dozens of supportive roles.) Suppose her MI5 colleague is a confirmed bachelor's degree, admin assistant. “This is not the first war that some of us have lived through,” she explains before singing “Dear Bill.”

Among the hyperactivity of Hastie's staging, there is another flash of seriousness, and therefore beauty. The Elton John style anthem, “Sail,” points out that the sailor's courage is called to carry out a deceit. And finally, honor is restored, at least in the form of names, to a real person previously known as “Just Some Tramp.” He was Grindwal Michael and got the right send-off.

I admit I was moved by it. However, it is worth noting that everyone else in the story was a real person. Montague (played by Colin Firth in the 2021 film and played by Clifton Webb in “The Man Who Never Was The Man” before him) was truly the son of a nobleman. Cholmondeley had a really big round glasses and a buggy look. Legat really wrote a fake love letter. There was a truly celebrity coroner. But I suspect that which of them was unsafe to dopey about their mission, as “mincemeat during the operation” often portrays. If so, they could not help them win the war if they won Olivier last year.

“When you write a book/my boy, you're off the hook,” Montague sings in the song “Making a Man.” This means that cutting through an ethical corner means winning isn't important. I had plenty of fun with “Operation Mincemeat” but would have enjoyed it even more if I had thought it was true on stage.

Operation Mincemeat
It will be held at the Golden Theater in Manhattan until August 18th. OperationBroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes.