Operation Mincemeat stars on British humour, Broadway and why fascism ‘hits differently’ in America

Operation Mincemeat was a masterstroke of misdirection. In 1943, British intelligence dressed a dead body as a Royal Marines officer, planted fake invasion plans then arranged for it to wash up on Spanish shores where enemy spies would feed the fake news back to Berlin. The ruse tricked the Nazis into believing the allies were planning to get a foothold on Italy via Sardinia rather than Sicily.

It’s a great story of deception and ingenuity. But a great story to adapt into a frantic, farcical musical that would become the toast of the West End and now Broadway? That seems as far-fetched as the original mission. Yet that’s exactly what comedy troupe SpitLip have achieved.

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It’s not the first time this story has been told: one of the masterminds behind the plan, Ewan Montagu, wrote The Man Who Never Was in 1953, which was turned into a film in 1956. Ben McIntyre wrote a thrilling account in 2010, serving as the basis for a 2021 film starring Colin Firth – but that had decidedly less singing than SpitLip’s version.

In this musical, which was first performed in 2019, five actors play 82 characters, with quick-change costumes and fake moustaches doing a lot of work. The style is Gilbert and Sullivan via Hamilton, drawing on end-of-the-pier traditions as much as a thoroughly modern sensibility full of humour and heart. It also has breathtaking moments of poignancy beneath the seemingly frothy surface.

It has become the most acclaimed show in West End history, with 70-plus five-star reviews and counting, leading to numerous run extensions. Such success makes Broadway the natural next step, but for Operation Mincemeat it looked like too giant a leap. There had to be a strategy.

The production’s social media account asked whether fans thought the show was “too British for Broadway?” The key to opening on Broadway was perhaps pretending that you’re not going to open on Broadway.

“I mean, possibly,” says David Cumming, one of the writers and stars who reprises his numerous parts in New York. “Those were real, genuine questions. That was a big worry – that American audiences wouldn’t get it, or wouldn’t care, or would need far more context put into the show. Then over time in the West End, the percentage of the audience who were Americans started growing from 1% to now it’s almost 20% every night, which is huge. So we knew there was this taste for it.”

Cumming, alongside fellow SpitLip members and stars of the show Natasha Hodgson and Zoë Roberts, join a call with Big Issue from America despite their schedules being packed by performances (“Oh, you know, as long as we get to talk about ourselves,” Hodgson says).

Since officially opening in New York last month, the original 16-week run has already been extended to
February 2026. It’s one of the hottest tickets in town.

“Steven Spielberg has seen it. Jesse Eisenberg and Samuel L Jackson,” Hodgson reports. “We had Lin-Manuel Miranda in to see it yesterday.”

“Thank god I didn’t know, otherwise I’m sure the words would have fallen completely out of my head,” says Roberts, who delivers a Hamilton-esque patter passage at the top of the show.

“Daniel Radcliffe, Harry Potter himself,” Cumming adds. “He was so lovely,” picks up Hodgson. “It is absolutely crazy. Just to see our little show with us bouncing hats around.” 

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The cast race out the gate and it takes a moment of acclimatisation for the audience to click into the same gear. Are US audiences slower to catch up?

“We throw a lot at the audience from the top,” Hodgson says. “We’re not necessarily what people expect from a musical: there’s only five of us, it’s an unexpected situation and we mess around with gender. So we’re very used to having the audience go ‘what?!’ for the first five to 10 minutes, be that a British ‘what’ or American ‘what’. But overall, a joke’s a joke and either you’ll laugh, or you won’t.”

Operation Mincemeat is not too British for Broadway; its fun and frivolity is the element that sets it apart. “We’ve been pleasantly surprised by how much Americans love the silly,” says Roberts. “I don’t know why we would ever doubt that because vaudeville, the Marx Brothers, Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, all of that stuff was birthed here. They get the games we’re playing very quickly. 

“They’re loving the really dumb stuff. Maybe because that’s what they need right now, a release and catharsis.” Operation Mincemeat is primarily played for laughs, but the backdrop is a fight against fascism. Who knew that a World War II-set comedy would become increasingly topical?

“The throughline of fascism hits differently in America,” says Hodgson. “Obviously it’s a particularly charged time right now.”

At the start of the second act the cast appear in their Third Reich finery delivering a boyband inspired number whose bland platitudes echo the empty ideologies we hear a lot of these days. 

How do the Nazis go down in the US? “In London, there’s more freedom to laugh at the Nazis on stage,” Roberts says. “Whereas here, definitely a mixed feeling in the audience, the discomfort that we’re actually aiming for. As well as the fun of that number – it is satire.”

Cumming continues: “It’s got more relevant since the first time we did the show. That number hasn’t particularly changed, it’s just got a different response as, terrifyingly, the far right seems to be back in political discourse.”

While we all wait for Nazis to just be a joke again, the SpitLip team reflect on their unexpected journey.

“We set about writing this as a calling card and then people with money will come to us with another story that they actually want made, and they’ll pay us to do that,” Cumming explains. “Instead, producers came along. None of this was ever inevitable. There were only five of us initially because that’s all we could afford. We thought maybe when it grows, we’ll have a big-kick chorus, all these dancing girls and beautiful boys and a gorgeous spectacle. Then we were like, no, that’s not the show. The show is the fun of the show. And the message of the show is a small group of people working tirelessly to trick either 100,000 Nazis or an audience of people into seeing things that aren’t actually there.”

Roberts adds: “In the early days, we were just figuring out how to tell this story as a musical. The various themes and messages have emerged over time, the potential of a group of people to make a difference.”

This sense of teamwork and belonging has inspired a dedicated group of fans, nicknamed Mincefluencers, who have helped supercharge the success.

Cumming says: “It’s a show where people feel they can be their fullest self, and the fandom really represents that. You find your lovely little gang and together you can do wonderful, mad things because you have each other.”

Operation Mincemeat’s finest achievement is bringing unrecognised heroes from the shadows. The dead body that helped win the war was in reality Glyndwr Michael, a Welshman who died homeless and anonymous on the streets of Croydon.

“It took a while for us to work out how to honour him,” Cumming says. “It wasn’t until after the pandemic that we started using the phrase: ‘If it’s down, it’s down together, if it’s up, it’s up as one,’ as his tribute. We hand the show over to him because he was forgotten in real life.”

“The most moving moments of the show come from real life,” Hodgson adds. “The submariners, when they realised what was happening, the last thing they did was say a prayer to Glyndwr Michael as they sent him off to sea. I don’t think our sad moments would hit in the same way if we didn’t shelter them in all this joy and frivolity. Silliness and horror live side-by-side. Particularly now, but same as it ever was.”

“A phrase I’ve always loved from the queer struggle is that joy is an act of resistance,” Cumming says. “Even in times of hardship, retaining your joy and staying happy is a thing that they can’t get or take away from you. Being able to spread that to other people is a really lovely gift.”

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