NEW YORK — Like a sequin-studded black ops mission, “Operation Mincemeat” has infiltrated the unlikeliest of Broadway audiences: the dads.
The farcical World War II comedy tells the mind-boggling true story of how British spies used a stolen corpse to mislead Nazi Germany about where the Allies planned to invade next. The scrappy, gender-bending show appeals to a unique cross section of theater kids and history buffs, with many audience members returning with their fathers.
“We never set out to make a piece of theater for the dads, but do you know what? We’re really here for it,” says Natasha Hodgson, one of the musical’s cocreators and stars. “It’s lovely to have the dads come and see a show, which is essentially about fighting fascism, how gender isn’t real, and how women should claim their history. Bring all the dads!”
The Olivier Award-winning production was conceived by Hodgson, David Cumming, Zoë Roberts, and Felix Hagan, who make up the theater company SpitLip. It is now up for four Tony Awards including best musical, with rapturous reviews and diehard fans (known as Mincefluencers) that have followed the show from London to New York.
“How does one react when you walk into Times Square and there’s your poster up there?” Hagan says. “Suddenly you’re afloat in an ocean, as opposed to standing in a puddle. It’s really quite astonishing.”
Tony-nominated ‘Operation Mincemeat’ brings an outrageous true story to Broadway
“Operation Mincemeat” is based on an elaborate 1943 scheme by British intelligence to trick the Germans into thinking that Allied troops were set to invade Greece instead of Sicily. The plan hinged on an unclaimed body from a London morgue, which agents dressed as a fake British officer named William Martin, whom they planted with forged documents. They then dropped the corpse off the Spanish coast and his briefcase was later recovered by the Nazis, who delivered the falsified orders straight to Adolf Hitler.
As a result, the Germans were caught off guard when Allied forces invaded Sicily, which helped further Benito Mussolini’s downfall and was considered a major turning point in World War II.
Hodgson first learned of the real-life Operation Mincemeat through a podcast that her brother recommended.
“Initially, I was like, ‘There’s enough art about World War II and I’m crushingly bored of it,’” Hodgson says. But she was quickly enraptured by the story’s vibrant characters and heist-like adventure: “I fell in love with it completely. It’s global stakes, but with this gang of little idiots.”
The fast-paced show got its start in 2019 at an 80-seat black-box theater in London. Some early audience members were vehemently opposed to the musical, arguing that it was too far-fetched and “disrespectful.”
“We got feedback saying, ‘You cannot lie about the war like this,’ when in actuality, it was all 100% true,” Cumming says. “For instance, there was a war magician who worked in the same department as these guys and created inflatable tanks to deceive the Germans. There was also a night-blind racecar driver who drove the body up to Scotland and crashed numerous times because he couldn’t see. We tried to put these things into the story, but there’s a limit to what audiences will believe. The truth is far more wild than you’re allowed to put on stage.”
Laughing, Hagan adds, “If we put in everything that we thought was funny, it’d be three days long. We should do a director’s cut.”
The musical honors ‘invisible’ World War II heroes including Glyndwr Michael
The show features a bevy of well-known figures including James Bond author Ian Fleming, who worked for Britain’s Naval Intelligence Division during World War II and helped brainstorm ideas for Operation Mincemeat. The Nazis also briefly appear in satirical fashion, with a K-pop-style dance number about succumbing to the far-right movement.
“Sonically, that’s why that song is so modern, because fascism was the new ideology at the time,” Cumming says. “It’s popular! It’s sexy! It’s cool! Then you catch yourself applauding and you’re like, ‘Did you turn your brain on for one second through any of that? Or did you just go along with it because it was exciting?’”
Although the song has been met with laughter in the U.K., it’s often greeted by stunned silence on Broadway, where it perhaps hits too close to home for American theatergoers.
“The discomfort here is quite palpable,” Roberts says. “I’ve had a couple people at the stage door say to me (proudly), ‘I didn’t clap after that number!’ And I’m like, ‘Well, thank you? We’re all going to be OK, aren’t we?’”
“Operation Mincemeat” shines a light on MI5’s unsung female employees Jean Leslie (Claire Marie-Hall) and Hester Leggatt (Jak Malone), whose photographs and love letters were instrumental in crafting a believable backstory for the fictitious William Martin.
The musical also gives a sneakily poignant tribute to Martin, who in reality, was a homeless man named Glyndwr Michael, who died after eating rat poison. Michael’s body was buried with full military honors in 1943 under his fake moniker, and in 1998, the British government added his true identity to his tombstone.
Throughout the show, the British spies frequently question who this man really is, although they don’t prioritize the answer until the very end, when details of Michael’s life are revealed to the audience.
It’s a chance “to pay respects to this person that had been invisible in society; that had fallen through the cracks and been forgotten about,” Roberts says. “It gives us a huge moment of catharsis.” By the finale, “we drop all the artifice and say, ‘Everybody is important.’ That being the lasting message of the show is something that we’re really proud of.”
“Operation Mincemeat” is now playing at the Golden Theatre (252 W. 45th Street).
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: ‘Operation Mincemeat’: The wild true story behind the Broadway show
