'Operation Mincemeat' review — bonkers musical tells a Trojan corpse story
Read our review of Operation Mincemeat on Broadway, an award-winning musical comedy from London centered on a real-life World War II deception operation.
Historical retellings can be as reverent as they are irreverent. In Operation Mincemeat, named after the eponymous World War II mission, a British MI5 security team poses an anonymous corpse as a fallen British pilot with a loaded briefcase of false information to drive the German military out of Sicily. The musical comedy gives this story a Looney Tunes spirit through the twists and turns.
Robert Hastie’s direction and Jenny Arnold’s frenetic choreography ensure a well-oiled engine of comedic and dramatic moving parts amid the music. Operation Mincemeat is indebted to its five-person English stars, who may be due for a Broadway breakthrough: David Cumming (as the charmingly meek Charles Cholmondeley), Claire-Marie Hall (as the spirited Jean Leslie), Natasha Hodgson (as the egotistical Ewen Montagu), Jak Malone (as the secretary Hester Leggat), Zoë Roberts (as the no-nonsense Colonel Johnny Bevan), also rotating through ensemble roles. They embody cartoonish characters yet don’t collapse into caricature.
In particular, the ingenious cross-gender casting of Hodgson, parodying manly bluster as Montagu, pokes knowing fun at the man otherwise glorified in British history. Malone plays middle-aged secretary Hester with a hard-boiled seniority while dipping into her private pains. Malone’s song “Dear Bill” catches the audience’s hearts off guard. These characters best represent how this group find themselves — although they won’t admit it aloud — living vicariously through a dead man, as highlighted in the signature number “Making a Man.”
Operation Mincemeat is a cup of British comedy, sometimes with drawn-out humor to a fault — not for every American. But it also captures the Hollywood hagiographic, the self-deprecating, the ironic, and the tragic that will make you gasp.
Operation Mincemeat summary
"How else do we make 100,000 German troops disappear?"
A transfer from London's West End with the original British cast, Operation Mincemeat follows a real-life slice of World War II history. A British MI5 team disguises a corpse as a British pilot, attaches it to a briefcase of false information, and arranges the dumping of the body at Spain shores to fool the German forces away from Sicily, so Britain can claim Sicily with reduced casualties and turn World War II in their favor.
Each of the main MI5 team members harbors different motives for their involvement, from Montagu’s greed for renown to Leslie’s desire for respect in a world that ignores women to Cholmondeley’s drive to simply get the job done.
Cumming, Hodgson, and Roberts co-wrote the musical with Felix Hagan; the four are collectively credited as the comedy troupe SpitLip.
What to expect at Operation Mincemeat
Ben Stones’ scenic military-grid backdrop may seem aesthetically modest — until the second half begins to deploy a succession of visual surprises and bonkers set pieces.
As comedic and morbid as the premise sounds, the musical nods at the ethics of exploiting an anonymous person’s body (the corpse is wisely left as an invisible entity for the audience’s imagination). Much of my audience’s indignant gasping came from Montagu’s callous consideration of the body’s history.
Operation Mincemeat can’t dive into World War II without taking stabs at Nazism in the vein of Mel Brooks humor. Act II opens with Nazis in the dubstep song “Das Übermensch,” followed by a character glaring at the American audience, breaking the fourth wall in reproach.
What audiences are saying about Operation Mincemeat
As of writing, the review aggregator Show-Score has a 89% audience approval rating for Operation Mincemeat, averaged from 103 member reviews.
- “It was a blast. It reminded me of the extremely creative direction and a bit of tongue and cheek from the British translate '39 steps'... Super fun for both a historical piece and an innovative new musical.” - Show-Score Mama Rose
- Show-Score user Marc 7104 said the musical “offered up a surprised discover[y] to me to experience one of the MOST TALENTED cast of five I have ever seen on Broadway in years.”
- “From the actors singing and rapping to the sound design with water effects and taking you to all these different places in the musical — it was seamless. The sound design never pulled you out of the story; it was just beautifully and effortlessly done. You really felt like you were right there in the room, trying to crack Operation Mincemeat and traveling around to meet all the different characters involved. Honestly, the only thing louder than the sound itself was the applause after every scene.” - My +1 at the show
Read more audience reviews of Operation Mincemeat on Show-Score.
Who should see Operation Mincemeat
- History buffs who enjoy historical musicals like Hamilton or Six can have fun with Operation Mincemeat’s coverage of history.
- It could be enjoyable for cinema lovers to watch the (unrelated) Operation Mincemeat movie from 2021 and/or 1956's The Man Who Never Was (which directly adapts Montagu’s same-named book and also cameos the man himself) and then the Operation Mincemeat musical, or vice versa.
- James Bond fans will laugh at the musical gags concerning Ian Fleming (played by Zoë Roberts). The show briefly depicts Fleming’s employment under the Naval Intelligence Division and the theatrical similarities between military schemes and spy fiction.
- Fans of the musical Dead Outlaw, coming to Broadway this April, will see parallels between these two historical corpses being reinvented postmortem. The two shows would make an interesting double feature, where a dead body in art can be a blank canvas for how we draw out our humanity.
Learn more about Operation Mincemeat on Broadway
Operation Mincemeat is blessed with a firecracker five-person cast. Even if its sense of British humor is not your cup of tea, it’s hard not to be in awe at its comedic and dramatic audacity.
Photo credit: Operation Mincemeat on Broadway. (Photos by Julieta Cervantes)
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