Given our national politics, the British musical Operation Mincemeat couldn’t arrive on Broadway at a more apposite time. Here’s a show that glamourizes deep state civil servants as hard-working, idealistic heroes using guile and grit to bring down Hitler. By contrast, we have people in the White House waving prop chainsaws and tweeting that federal bureaucrats are worse than Der Führer…who maybe wasn’t such a bad guy, had some interesting ideas. In the gross topsy-turveydom of Bizarro America, we sure could use a laugh. Five wildly talented English clowns are happy to oblige. Just don’t expect them to play the Kennedy Center.
Devised by the comedy troupe SpitLip, Mincemeat an unlikely showbiz success about an unlikely counterintelligence success. The cheeky musical debuted in London’s equivalent of Off-Off Broadway and quickly transferred to the West End (where it’s still running). The source material is the same as that of a (rather wooden) 2022 Netflix film starring Colin Firth and Matthew Macfadyen. In 1943, a group of MI5 agents concoct a stunt to convince Hitler’s generals that Allied forces are invading Sardinia—when, in fact, Sicily is the target. If they can get Adolf to move his men, Sicily can be taken. But how to slip the baddies this disinformation? Stuff a briefcase with fake military plans and attach it to the corpse of a Royal Marines officer who will be found floating off the coast of Spain, dead from a crash. Easy-peasy.
The hideously complicated and not-at-all certain logistics of this spy mission yields a surprisingly rich bounty of quick-change comedy and novelty songs, giddily directed by Robert Hastie. The nimble quintet (three of the cast wrote music, lyrics and book) play more than 80 characters, from stock Cockneys gassing on the corner to a happy-go-lucky American pilot, assorted sailors, officers, Spanish coroners, Nazis, and a dimwitted, pre-Bond Ian Fleming. Their baseline principal roles are cocky Ewan Montagu (Natasha Hodgson); insecure and geeky Charles Cholmondeley (David Cumming); clever and frustrated young secretary Jean Leslie (Claire-Marie Hall); older, prim secretary Hester Leggatt (Jak Malone); and starchy Johnny Bevan (Zoë Roberts), head of military deception. Montagu latches onto Charles’s outlandish scheme to keep a dead body on ice, invent an officer persona, and launch the grisly trick from a British sub. Enter a sleazy, back-alley coroner (Malone) in top hat and black cape splashed with glitter blood, singing of “[o]ld ladies to adolescents, in all stages of putrescence.”
By now you may suspect the SpitLip approach to World War II (though hewing to facts) has all the gravitas of a Christmas panto or Horrible Histories. Each of the performers has their signature style. Hodgson, in male drag, is smarmily sexy, Roberts specializes in male thickos, and Cumming is a twitchy, antic goon. All their performances are pitched to a children’s TV show level of goofing. Thus the comedy ranges from kindergarten to fourth grade. If this is your thing, great. (My friend found the hyperactive mugging and silly voices grating on the nerves.) There are more serious attempts to inject social commentary on gender inequities back then at MI5 and passages that acknowledge Britons’ grief and sacrifice during wartime. But even the pathos is laid on thick, and spills over into mawkishness. The song “Dear Bill,” in which priggish Hester dictates a fictitious letter to the fake officer from his girlfriend, begins touchingly enough and deepens when we intuit that Hester lost a boyfriend during the Great War. But the number simply overstays its welcome and milks the tears. I suppose Brits need these annual excuses to cry in public, but in New York we call it schmaltz.
I can’t say the score is destined for greatness, but it facilitates a clever rhyme here and there as well as rigorously silly comic staging (such as a slapstick ballet of two telephones, two hats and a briefcase). Music-wise the score’s a pastiche of show tune soundalikes with a heavy quotient of rapping clearly modeled after Hamilton. Some of the patter songs are too dense to parse every word (such as Bevan’s prolix debriefings), but it hardly matters. There’s a legit hilarious Act II opening number: rapping Nazis with boyband moves (choreographed by Jenny Arnold) to an epilepsy-inducing light show (designed by Mark Henderson), spitting rhymes in praise of “Das Übermensch.” Does Act II feel padded with feminist messaging and humblebrag Brit patriotism? It does. But when are we ever going to see theater again from artists actually proud of their country? Operation Mincemeat is totally lovable and expertly zany, with Big Let’s Put on a Show Energy. See it now before SpitLip’s visas are revoked and they get thrown in Guantánamo.
Operation Mincemeat | 2hrs 35mins. One intermission. | John Golden Theatre | 252 West 45th Street | 212-239-6200 | Buy Tickets Here
