Operation Mincemeat: Stage musical to transfer to Broadway

A British musical which started life in an 80-seat fringe theatre in London is to transfer to Broadway next year.

Operation Mincemeat has gradually built a dedicated audience since its launch in 2019, reaching the West End last year.

Word of mouth and critical acclaim have seen it extended at the Fortune Theatre several times and have now helped propel the musical to Broadway.

David Cumming, one of the show’s writers and composers, told BBC News: “There’s a real sense of vertigo when comparing where we started to where we are now.

“It’s hard to believe that our precious baby of a show has grown into what feels like a leviathan that’s now riding across the pond. It’s both exciting and daunting.”

The show will begin previews at the John Golden Theatre on Broadway on 15 February 2025.

The British production previously won both an Olivier and a WhatsOnStage award for best new musical.

Operation Mincemeat first played in London at the 80-seater New Diorama Theatre, a charming but modest venue which provides a home for independent theatre.

After further development runs at London Fringe theatres, the show transferred to the Fortune Theatre.

Despite being one of the West End’s smaller theatres, it attracted a dedicated cult following, including a group of fans who call themselves “Mincefluencers”.

The re-worked version attracted positive reviews from critics, with many awarding four or five stars.

The Telegraph’s Marianka Swain described it as a “glorious combination of ingenious, silly and surprisingly moving”.

“It honours these war heroes, but with that key British asset: a sense of humour,” she added.

“They’re laser-focussed on getting us to laugh,” noted Time Out’s Andrzej Lukowski. “There’s little of the saccharine baggage of the average musical, no romance, no learning life lessons, no big introspective moments.”

The Evening Standard’s Nick Curtis said it was an “exuberant, energetic, incurably daft show”, adding its “five-year journey through fringe and regional theatres has become part of the story”.

Operation Mincemeat opened in the West End in March 2023. Originally scheduled for an eight-week residency, it has been repeatedly extended and is currently due to play at the theatre until March.

Set in 1943 amid World War Two, Operation Mincemeat tells the story of how Britain was able to deceive the Germans via an elaborate ruse.

Intelligence officers planted fake documents in the briefcase of a corpse, which they had wash up on a beach where they knew the body would be found.

The false secrets contained in the documents were designed to fool the Germans about the true target for the Allied invasion of Sicily.

The story was also made into a 2021 film starring Colin Firth, Matthew Macfadyen and Kelly Macdonald. An earlier film about the same story, The Man Who Never Was, was released in 1956.

The musical’s writers and composers are David Cumming, Felix Hagan, Natasha Hodgson and Zoë Roberts – four friends known collectively as SpitLip.

“We knew we didn’t have the money or the facilities to make a big ‘wow’ comedy show,” Hodgson recalled. “We didn’t have the contacts or the experience to cause a splash.

“But we loved this story so much, and thought that if we pulled all our resources together, we’d have one shot at doing it justice.”

Hagan continued: “Then we slowly started to show it to people, and miraculously they seemed to agree that this truly preposterous tale of corpses, posh boys and newts was just the sort of thing to put on next to the Lion King.”

Roberts said there was something about “a ludicrous tale of a band of misfits joining together with a plan to achieve something massive that’s always felt really special to a bunch of pals who’ve spent years making comedy together on the Fringe”.