Last year, the hit West End musical “Operation Mincemeat” embarked on a mischievous publicity campaign. “Are we too British for Broadway?” it asked, inviting Americans on its email list and via social media to fill out an online questionnaire about whether, for instance, they had trouble understanding British accents. (“No,” 90.2 percent of the respondents said.)
After making its way across the ocean armed with high expectations and an Olivier Award for best new musical, the show, a screwball comedy about an unlikely World War II spy operation, will open March 20 at the Golden Theater on Broadway. Its lengthy preview period is giving it ample time to adjust to the particular sensibilities of a New York audience, unaccented or otherwise.
Some of what the cast and crew have found has been surprising, said the director, Robert Hastie, who was so eager for early on-the-ground feedback that he strode onstage before the curtain rose at the first preview and boldly (or maybe recklessly) gave out his email address to the packed house.
“This show has always grown and developed from what the audience has been kind enough to give back,” he told the crowd. “If you have any thoughts when you come away from tonight, we’d be really, really grateful.”
The real Operation Mincemeat was a sleight-of-hand spy mission in 1943, in which the British dressed a dead body as a Royal Marines officer, outfitted it with fake invasion plans designed to hide the Allies’ real intentions and then dumped it into the sea to be discovered by the Nazis. Its musical version has had a charmed trajectory in London, opening in 2019 at the tiny New Diorama Theater before settling in at the Fortune Theater in the West End, where it’s still playing.
What Hastie has learned from the audiences so far,: first, that Broadway theatergoers don’t need to be walked through lengthy historical expositions. “We’ve been surprised at how much of a lean-forward audience this is,” he said. “They want the story told more thriftily, and so we’ve taken a couple of lines out here and there.”
Also: “American audiences are quick and sophisticated, but they also love the dumb stuff, like the slapstick and the physical comedy, almost more than the British,” Hastie said. This has led to, among other things, a ratcheting up of the comic mayhem in several scenes involving briefcases that may or may not contain incriminating documents, and that various characters are trying to retain, get rid of or conceal.
Written and composed by the comedy group SpitLip, the production features five actors playing a total of 82 characters. Three of the actors — David Cumming, Natasha Hodgson and Zoë Roberts — are part of SpitLip; the other two, Jak Malone and Claire-Marie Hall, are not. (The fourth SpitLip member, Felix Hagan, doesn’t perform in the show.) The original cast has followed the show to New York.
Having an original cast of performer-writers with comedy backgrounds has made for an unusually nimble production, as the actors can rewrite lines and reconfigure scenes themselves. While in the show’s earlier iterations they often reworked things on the fly, that’s no longer viable now that they are on Broadway — among other things, unexpected line changes mess up the lighting cues, Hastie said.
They came to New York prepared to treat the audience almost as “the sixth member of the cast,” Cumming said, and to rejigger the show as needed.
“If there are lines that don’t work, references that don’t work, moments where we feel it’s not quite landing — if we’re difficult to understand — we’re ready and willing to put on the old boots again and make new changes,” Hodgson said.
Changes have been small, inserted mostly to un-muddy various points of cultural divergence. “Public school” (as in Eton, the school several main characters attend) was changed to “private school,” because the words mean opposite things in Britain and the United States.
A reference to “Fleming” (as in Ian Fleming, the author of the James Bond spy novels and a character in the musical) was sharpened to include his first name. And “Number 10,” the British shorthand for the prime minister’s office, was changed to the more-recognizable-to-foreigners “Downing Street.”
Finally, the scene-setting voice-over that begins 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 so much of it was fantastical,” said Jon Thoday, a lead producer of the musical.
In London, the production enjoys an unusually intimate relationship with its fans, a noisy and opinionated bunch. The most passionate ones, known as Mincefluencers, have been known to show up at the theater en masse, cosplaying “Mincemeat” characters. Many have seen the production dozens of times and can recite every line.
An estimated 300 Mincefluencers flew to New York for the first preview, cheering so raucously after the songs that the noise sometimes drowned out the actors trying to go on with the show. Afterward, the fans waited outside the Golden for the cast to emerge and then burst into a full rendition of the “Mincemeat” song “Sail on, Boys,” right on 45th Street.
Inside the theater, where the production team was having a post-show meeting, the song could be heard through the walls. “Bloody hell,” Hastie said. “Is this normal on Broadway — they just repeat the show on the street?”
The Golden, with its 800 or so seats, is nearly twice as large as the 435-seat Fortune, the show’s London venue, but the stage footprint is the same. That means the production has not had to adjust its timing, planned out to the split second, for scene and costume changes. “Some of the costume changes are very, very fast,” Malone said. (That is an understatement.)
The real-life operation has been portrayed in other media before, including in a 2010 book by Ben Macintyre and a 2022 Netflix film starring Colin Firth and Matthew Macfadyen. But though its absurdity and audacity make it a delicious object of fascination, it seemed like a far-fetched, even preposterous, idea for a musical comedy.
Hodgson first heard about it on a family vacation when her younger brother, Joe, told her about a podcast episode that piqued his interest. “He said, ‘I’m listening to a story that should be a musical,’” Hodgson said. SpitLip had been writing for some time, to critical but not commercial success, and Hodgson couldn’t imagine doing a show about the war. “I was like, ‘Shut up, Joe.’”
But she listened to the episode anyway, and was mesmerized. “I couldn’t believe how crazy and chaotic the story was,” she said. “It was a World War II mission, but I was like, ‘Who cares? It’s an amazing spy farce with an enormous heart at its center,’” she said.
The group made two important decisions early on. One: Though the story contains multitudes, they would confine the cast to just five people playing all the parts. (Hats and mustaches do a lot of work.) Two: They would stick to the “gender-blank” casting they had used in previous SpitLip work. Sometimes, men play women and women play men; other times, they don’t.
“If I can play a policeman, why not play a male?” said Zoë Roberts, who plays, among other parts, Johnny Bevan, the MI5 official overseeing the operation. Having women depict the conceited upper-class men who orchestrated the British war effort allowed them to send up the men’s overconfident entitlement. “In the hands of a woman performer, the role becomes a commentary on the power structure,” she said.
By the same token, the role of Hester, an older secretary — a showstopping part with a heartbreaking song about loss and grief — was written specifically for a male actor, and is performed by Malone. It helped him win the Olivier Award in 2024 for best supporting actor in a musical.
Oddly enough, the gender of the actors doesn’t feel like a big deal when you watch the show. “Gender is a hot topic, and there’s a generation of people who are afraid of that conversation,” Hodgson said. “We wanted this to be a place where it’s touched on lightly, where gender melts away, and where people who don’t understand might come and see that it’s not alien and frightening.”
There’s another thing that Hastie, the director, has noticed about the New York audiences, at least at this singular historical moment: a craving for the chance to affirm the principles of democracy that animated World War II and that quietly underpin the production. Typically, the song “Das Übermensch,” a razzle-dazzle-y faux K-Pop boy-band-esque number featuring the cast dressed as stylish Nazis, plays purely for laughs, much the way “Springtime for Hitler” does in “The Producers.”
But something has shifted in New York, Hastie said, and audiences have been cheering and applauding not at the humor so much as at the opportunity to denounce what the Nazis represent.
“The show is really hitting the audiences in a different place,” he said. “Not just because of the difference in nationality or culture, but because the world is changing really fast.”
There’s a sense from the audiences that “we want to defeat those guys because they’re evil and because democracy, and freedom, matter,” he added. “This is musical comedy, but it’s also something that people are getting really invested in.”
