The real-life story behind the Olivier Award-winning musical “Operation Mincemeat” isn’t just stranger than fiction. It’s so strange that some parts of the story proved just too much for audiences to buy.
Listen to this week’s “Stagecraft” podcast below:
“There were a lot of very unbelievable details that we would initially put into the show, but then we’d share it with audiences and they’d be like: ‘You can’t lie about the war like this!’” recalled the show’s co-creator and one of its stars, David Cumming, on the latest episode of Variety’s theater podcast, “Stagecraft.” “It was all true; it was just unknown. And so” — because audiences just wouldn’t believe some of those details — “there’s a lot of stuff that has fallen by the wayside.”
Cumming appeared on “Stagecraft” with his fellow co-creators and actors, Natasha Hodgson and Zoë Roberts, along with their co-stars in the production, Claire-Marie Hall and Jak Malone. (All five are pictured in the photo above.) The musical’s move to Broadway, where it began previews Feb. 15, is the latest stop for a show that started small in 2019 and but has since snowballed in popularity. Last year it ended up in the West End, where “Mincemeat” won the Olivier Award for new musical and scored an acting award for Malone.
The show tells the WWII-era tale of a real-life espionage mission conducted by MI5 to trick the Nazis into believing that the allies intended to invade Greece instead of their true target, Sicily. The scheme came together thanks to an anonymous corpse and an elaborate fictional backstory, among other bonkers details. (The true story also inspired a 2022 movie that starred Colin Firth.)
Initially, the musical’s collaborators didn’t love the idea of trying to tell a story set in that particular era. “I couldn’t believe I was going to suggest that we write a musical about World War II, the most overdone topic of culture in the history of — anything, really,” Hodgson remembered.
“I thought, oh, we’re not going to write a story about tweed and powdered eggs and everyone being sad during the war!” Cumming chimed in.
“But it’s basically the most crazy true story,” Roberts said. “It’s about a bunch of little freaks achieving something amazing.”
With the show’s five actors playing more than 60 characters in total, the cast has worked hard to differentiate all their roles, from bit player to protagonist, with the help of what Roberts described as a “sliding scale” of where a particular character sits on the spectrum between “realistic” and “complete cartoon.”
And when all else fails, costumes help differentiate characters, too.
“Have you ever heard of a thing called a hat?” Cumming joked, and Hodgson added, “You don’t need talent if there’s a thing on your head!”
To hear the entire conversation, listen at the link above or download and subscribe to “Stagecraft” on podcast platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify and the Broadway Podcast Network. New episodes of “Stagecraft” are released every other week.
