In 1943, in wartime England, a homeless person dies in the street after ingesting rat poison. Given a fake postmortem identity by British counterintelligence officers — no effort to find his family is made — he is dressed in a military uniform, sealed in a cooler, then ejected from a submarine near the coast of Spain. The papers planted on his corpse eventually make their way to Hitler, convincing him that the Allies will begin their invasion of Europe in Sardinia, when in fact they plan to do so in Sicily. As a result, Axis troops are diverted to the wrong Italian island.
In short, Operation Mincemeat, as this real World War II operation was called, works.
But is it funny?
Whether “Operation Mincemeat,” the diverting if irksome musical comedy about the plan, works as well will depend a lot on your answer to that question. A hit in London, it has come to Broadway, where it opened on Thursday at the Golden Theater, having paid close attention to differences in accent, dialect and usage between British and American audiences. (Public school there is private school here.) But neither the authors, a collective called SpitLip, nor the director, Robert Hastie, appear to have given sufficient thought to our different senses of humor.
Theirs you will recognize. It combines Oxbridge snootiness with panto ribaldry to create a self-canceling middlebrow snark. You may detect in the show’s DNA elements of Monty Python, Benny Hill, “The Play That Goes Wrong” and the Hitchcock stage spoof “The 39 Steps.” But if those influences have made you laugh, even as much as they have made me, you may still experience diminishing returns in the nonstop tickling of “Operation Mincemeat.” The Pythons kept their satire sharp and their sketches quick.
Not so here. At more than two-and-a-half hours, the show is hardly svelte. Nor, with its aim so scattershot, is it clear what it is satirizing.
At first it seems to want to mock the public school toffs and blustery brass who populate MI5, the agency that developed the plan. They are offered as idiots, freaks and over-entitled snobs. In the show’s first song, “Born to Lead,” Ewen Montagu (Natasha Hodgson) explains that “fortune favors bravery and a fortune’s what I’ve got.” His colleague Charles Cholmondeley (David Cumming) is a nervous Nellie and an amateur entomologist with bugged-out eyes behind big round glasses that make him look like a cartoon click beetle. The predominant trait of their colonel, Johnny Bevan (Zoë Roberts), is that he despises figurative language.
But just when you think the show will be one long variation on the Pythons’ Ministry of Silly Walks routine, it swerves to a different target: men’s stupidity about women. Hired to serve tea, Jean Leslie (Claire-Marie Hall) leads the other “girls” in a Beyoncé tribute called “All the Ladies,” about making the most of employment opportunities now that the boys are off fighting. Yet the women, too, are satirized, presented as blithe opportunists: “On your marks get set / Take this war for all you can get.”
This is even before we get to the celebrity coroner who offers “old ladies to adolescents / in all stages of putrescence,” and, at the top of Act II, a “Producers” homage called “Das Übermensch,” complete with K-pop precision dancing (choreography by Jenny Arnold) and swastika propellers. The James Bond creator Ian Fleming, who worked on the project as a naval intelligence officer, also gets ribbed. A glitzy finale called “A Glitzy Finale” mostly pokes fun at musical theater itself.
No doubt these are all worthy targets, but they tend to be targeted in much the same way regardless of how worthy they are. Similarly, as the show swerves from topic to topic, its songs stay mostly in one place. Many are rhythmic ditties verging on rap — fine for solos but indecipherable chorally, especially when the rhymes are so vague. (“Moscow” and “crossbow” made my ears cringe.) The tinny orchestration for keyboards, bass and drums doesn’t help.
You could leave “Operation Mincemeat” at that: a show trying to be something it isn’t, like the corpse in its borrowed uniform. (I assume it is purposeful that the sets and costumes, by Ben Stones, look cheap.) Yet, on occasion, amid the tiresome glee, the SpitLip authors (Cumming, Hodson, Roberts and Felix Hagan) prove themselves capable of much more. Unexpectedly, a character who seemed to be a stock figure — the dowdy matron, clucking over the girls in her charge — emerges as someone much richer and better, raising the show along with her.
She is Hester Leggatt, played, in the drag tradition of the music hall, by Jak Malone. (Gender is a revolving door for all five actors as they quickly sketch dozens of supporting roles.) Though her MI5 colleagues assume that Leggatt, an administrative assistant, is a confirmed bachelorette, with all that implies, when asked to help write a letter that the corpse will carry from a fictional sweetheart her own lost love comes out. “This isn’t the first war that some of us have lived through,” she explains before singing “Dear Bill,” in which fabulation and true feeling mix to gorgeous effect.
There are other flashes of seriousness and thus beauty amid the hyperactivity of Hastie’s staging. “Sail on, Boys,” an anthem in the style of Elton John, notes the bravery of the seamen called on to carry out the deception. And at the end, honor, at least in the form of a name, is restored to the real person, formerly called “just some tramp,” whose body was used in the mission. He was Glyndwr Michael and gets a suitable send-off.
I admit I was moved by that. Yet it’s worth noting that everyone else in the story was a real person too. Montagu (played by Colin Firth in the 2021 movie and before him Clifton Webb in “The Man Who Never Was”) really was a son of the nobility. Cholmondeley really had big round glasses and a buggy look. Leggatt really wrote the fake love letter. There really was a celebrity coroner. But I highly doubt any of them were as dopey and larky and unserious about their mission as “Operation Mincemeat” too often portrays them to be. If they were, they couldn’t have helped win a war, even if they did win an Olivier last year.
“When you write the book / My boy you’re off the hook,” Montagu sings in a song called “Making a Man” — meaning that cutting ethical corners doesn’t matter if you win. I enjoyed “Operation Mincemeat” well enough, but I would have enjoyed it much more if I thought that were true onstage.
Operation Mincemeat
Through Aug. 18 at the Golden Theater, Manhattan; operationbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes.
