Now those winds have blown the cast of Operation Mincemeat to the shores of New York City— seemingly straight from the Olivier Awards after-party where they celebrated their two wins, including best new musical. Once they towel off, they’ll begin performances on Saturday at Broadway’s Golden Theater, ahead of an opening night next month. Were the corpse to wake up today, he would not be as shocked at this outcome as the Mincemeat team.
“When we found the idea for the show, we were all genuinely quite upset,” says David Cumming, a SpitLip member in the cast. “We were like, does anyone need any more art about World War fucking Two?” But the troupe—a ragtag team which also includes castmates Natasha Hodgson and Zoë Roberts, plus the writer-musician Felix Hagan—carried on. They saw an opportunity to poke fun at that time in British history, which Hodgon says is “the one war we all got taught, and in a, remember how Britain was so wonderful? way.” Where others saw a military victory, these four spied a comedy about a group of people stealing bodies and tossing them at sea.
The story also ticked all their boxes, and rather reflected their own: a comedy about a core gang pulling off an audacious stunt. A very limited budget meant there could be no elaborate costumes or scene changes, resulting in a hat-on-hat-off style that established silliness as the production’s guiding principle. But as they learned more about key characters in the plot, like a secretary named Hester Leggatt who time had entirely forgotten, they realized Operation Mincemeat could also be an opportunity to redeem the “smaller” parts history’s victorious authors are wont to exclude.
That role would eventually go to Jak Malone, a huge admirer of the team’s previous work who’d made his way onto their radar by making fan art. (At Malone’s audition, Hodgson says, the group initially groaned about “the fan-art guy” coming in.) On the first day of rehearsal, however, he reduced the production’s lighting designer to tears singing the show’s heartstopping ballad “Dear Bill.”
