Theater: “Operation Mincemeat”
The latest import from the West End, a musical comedy named “Operation Mincemeat,” is based on a true story. In 1943, several M5 intelligence officers cooked up a scheme to fool Hitler into thinking the Allies were planning to invade the island of Sardinia, not Sicily, thereby causing the Third Reich to deploy its forces to the wrong island.
The plan however involved the Allies’ creating an imaginary solider named “Bill,” a British spy who would travel to Spain and die en route with the phony invasion plans in his coat pocket. To make this work, M5 first had to obtain a corpse from a London morgue, place “Bill’s” body on a barge in the middle of the night, and arrange to have it dumped off the coast of Spain so that it would be discovered by the Germans.
A troupe of British actors named SpitLip saw the comic potential in this far-fetched scheme and built “Operation Mincemeat” around it. The co-writer and co-composer are a) David Cumming, who also plays Lieutenant Charles Cholmoledy in the show, an M5 lackey with goofy glasses and a phobia about bees, and b) Natasha Hogdson who plays Ewen Montagu, his swaggering upright military superior.
They and three other actors switch back and forth between male and female roles, changing costumes and genders faster than you can say Bob’s your uncle (or your aunt.)
The book moves a mile a minute and happily, the jokes land more often than not. The brand of humor is best described as a melding of “The Play That Goes Wrong,” and “Monty Python.” There’s an even a brief homage to Mel Brooks’ “The Producers” called “Das Übermensch,” complete with K-pop choreography. The score is an amalgam of British music hall music, Gilbert and Sullivan, with occasional strains of “Hamilton”-ian hiphop.
Halfway through Act One, the frenzied pace subsides briefly for one of the play’s most emotionally wrenching scenes: when M5 agent Hester Leggett (played by Jak Malone) sings “Dear Bill.” The lyrics are the content of the letter from Bill’s sweetheart that the dead men would have had in his pocket when his body was found. While Bill never existed, it is clear that Hester is someone who has experienced real love and loss in his life.
There’s a chorus line of dancing Nazis, one comic setup involving tangled phone cords, and still another with diplomats speaking fractured Spanish. As if that weren’t enough to keep you engaged, the finale pays tribute to the homeless man whose corpse helped the whole plot succeed in the first place.
While the sun may never set on the British empire, the same cannot be said for this British import, which ends its run in a dew short months. So unless you want your dreams ground into—ahem—mincemeat, make haste to the box office, Yank.
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