Zoë Roberts, Jak Malone, Natasha Hodgson, David Cumming, and Claire-Marie Hall in Operation Mincemeat. Photo: Julieta Cervantes

Post-Covid-shutdown, there’s been an uptick in the small-cast musical—Six or Maybe Happy Ending, for example—whether for reasons of budget, infection control, or fitting an entire touring company in one minivan. But Operation Mincemeat is ingenious enough to have its cake and eat it too, stuffing a giant array of characters into a five-person ensemble—which also contains three-quarters of the British comedy troupe SpitLip, who wrote the book, music, and lyrics (David Cumming, Felix Hagan, Natasha Hodgson, and Zoë Roberts; Hagan is the one who’s not onstage). The show has grown over the last five years from small London venues to an ever-extended West End production to its current incarnation on Broadway (whose limited run keeps extending), but it retains its roots in scrappy, DIY production while relishing in its chances to glow-up with a splashy Broadway finale. It’s delightfully lighthearted while also being a reasonably accurate depiction of a deadly serious historical event, displaying a heart of plucky do-gooder-ism, and packing a few pointedly modern satirical punches. (Definitely also falling into the having-their-cake-and-eating-it-too category; you have to enjoy the “more is more” aesthetic here…and have a certain amount of patience for jokes about amphibian anatomy. If you have to ask, you probably don’t want to know. It is not groaner-free, is all I’m saying) 

Each of the actors has a principal role as part of the team planning a WWII British intelligence deception operation: the plan’s two architects, the geeky naturalist Charles Cholmondeley (pronounced “Chumley” and played by David Cumming) and the suave upper-cruster Ewen Montagu (Natasha Hodgson); Colonel John Bevan, their commanding officer (Zoë Roberts); an ambitious young clerk, Jean Leslie (Claire-Marie Hall); and Leslie’s boss, doyenne of the clerical pool Hester Leggatt (Jak Malone). All five double / triple / quadruple as not only all secondary characters but an entire chorus of waiters / Nazis / submarine officers / secretaries / newsies who one would swear from moment to moment add up to a great number more than five people, swapping genders, ages, and nationalities with little more than a plethora of accents and a few costume pieces–most delightfully the red-sequin-adorned apron and gloves worn by the pathologist character who helps the Mincemeat team find their corpse. (The script dictates that Montagu be played by a woman and Leggatt by a man, just because it’s more fun that way, but makes no other specific casting suggestions. Seeing how well Hodgson displays the effortless confidence of a hail-fellow-well-met Etonian and Malone brings out the tender mother hen beneath Leggatt’s officiousness, I can’t argue with those choices.) 

The music is perhaps a little too indebted to the Hamilton mode of storytelling, with a lot of songs teetering on the border between Gilbert-and-Sullivan-style patter and rap (though fortunately falling mostly on the side of patter; somehow a bunch of upper-class Brits rapping requires more suspension of disbelief than American revolutionaries). Still, the team pulls out another mode when the scene calls for it–most notably in the Act 2 opener “Das Ubermensch,” a dance track for a group of Nazis that feels like it was cribbed from Six, and “Dear Bill,” the song that reveals Hester’s backstory with genuine pathos. 

The frantic, often incredibly silly plate-juggling–what is with those newsies?–seems like it might be out of place in a true story about a covert operation that shifted the course of World War II, except that the story itself is so very nearly unbelievable–and so hair-raisingly packed with narrow escapes from disaster–that it makes perfect sense to lean in to the inherent absurdity in telling the tale. Operation Mincemeat itself seems just as mad a scheme in 2025 as it did in 1943: in order to hoodwink the Germans into moving a large number of troops away from Sicily to allow the Allies to invade without massive casualties, MI5 needed to persuasively leak information showing an alternate invasion plan. The way they did this was by transporting a corpse, with a painstakingly constructed fake identity as a British pilot, via submarine to the coast of Spain in hopes that after he washed ashore, the purportedly neutral Spanish would pass the documents he carried (in a briefcase handcuffed to his belt) to the Germans. In order to accomplish that, they first needed a corpse, but not just any corpse: a corpse no one would miss. Much of the plot circles around finding this corpse–a homeless Welshman who died by accidentally ingesting rat poison–and building up his cover identity as the heroic pilot Bill Martin, whose legend includes a photo of his fiancee (actually a photo of Jean Leslie), love letters, theater ticket stubs, and a receipt for an engagement ring.  

The underlying story has already been the subject of a memoir by Montagu that became a 1956 movie, several other stage plays and musicals, a nonfiction bestseller that was itself turned into a 2021 movie, and several podcast episodes–but this version succeeds on its own terms, and on a number of grounds.

First, while it often takes time for a small detour or a bit of character business, it never loses sight of narrative momentum, or gives up storytelling in the service of a good joke. It’s a tribute to director Robert Hastie and costume designer Ben Stones, as well as the ensemble, that there’s never a moment when it’s unclear who’s who, or when an actor has swapped their main role for another.  

The show also pays pointed attention to the class and gender dynamics underlying the wartime workforce: The class dynamics that pervade MI5, where an Eton school tie is the fastest way to get your ideas in the right ears, as we see right from the beginning when Cumming’s awkward competence as Cholmondeley keeps getting him bumped to the back of the queue when he fails to stand up to the offhanded exertion of privilege. The sardonic joy of Hall’s Leslie when she realizes it’s taken a world war for her innate ambition to allow an actual job opportunity, or the stiff upper lip of Malone’s Leggatt when she realizes her own personal tragedy might need to be exploited for this cause. None of this ever feels forced, though; it’s all woven into the humor and the narrative. 

And finally, the show slips in a few pointed messages for its US audience: “If people like us just blindly follow orders, the fascists won’t need to bash the door down…they’ll have already won.” 

All of this could, of course, in the hands of an ensemble less committed to every tiny beat and bit, go terribly far off the rails, or–only slightly less worse–become one of those British imports that loses all its verve in crossing the ocean (Tammy Faye, anyone?). Especially at this particularly fascist-adjacent moment in American history, the risk of importing a Monty-Python-esque comedy about banding together to poke Hitler in the eye–about brains and pluck turning the tide of fascism–would seem to be extremely high. Even if the jokes land, the show could end up feeling supercilious and smug, lording its efficacy over us Americans as we stumble down our perilous path, using its moments of real sentiment and real heart to bash us over the head with how much we are not pulling together in a time of crisis. It’s a solid relief, then, to find Operation Mincemeat succeeds as both buoyant entertainment and gently inspiring reminder that heroism takes the most unlikely forms, and we all have our part to play in turning the tide of fascism. They may have scaled up from their off-off-West-End origins, but the heart of an ensemble piece remains. Now all the rest of us need to do is find a way to work together as seamlessly as the SpitLip ensemble.