Make a musical about World War 2 and it is the funniest thing ever?
Turns out you can do exactly that.
Operation Mincemeat is a new musical performing at Fortunes Theatre. With its debut in 2019, it quickly grew to be a favorite, having won the Laurance Olivier Award for Best Musical in 2024. It was performed in a proscenium-style theatre, and I watched it from the highest seats.
Let’s start with some context. Operation Mincemeat was a real-life British deception operation, that disguised the Allied invasion of Sicily during World War two. This deception operation consisted of dressing up a corpse as an officer of the Royal Marines, planting misleading information, and dropping it off in the water, in hopes of fooling the Germans into moving their troops. AND IT WORKED.
The musical is based on the real-life events described above but with a comedic twist. With a cast of only five, they were able to convey so many different characters, and in a way I didn’t expect. The show starts with a bunch of people in suits, ready to pitch an idea. But something is different about it. The women in the scene are also in men’s suits, and talking about how men run the world. I quickly realized after the second scene, that all the actors were cross-dressing. And it worked so well. Some actors played their typical gendered roles throughout, with the occasional change in gender, and some kept the cross-dressing for their main role. It’s hard to explain, but it was eye-opening to see a show of this scale, make such an artistic choice. Especially since the only physical distinction of characters was costume and accessories. When actor George Jennings played a secretary, there wasn’t a wig to make him look more feminine. He just embodied the feminine character, put on a dress, and it didn’t ruin the believability of the story at all. This whole show is a dramatic interpretation of a story about World War two. It already was not a “realistic”.
Which brings me to talk about the incredible acting from the cast. I have never seen a cast switch between so many different characters in one show. It was amazing to see how quickly an actor would transition from one character to a different one. It didn’t matter if it was a man playing a woman, because we saw the character. Gender wasn’t important in the telling of the story, and I love that. During Hester’s Leggat’s solo, the actor Christian Andrews convincingly brought all of us to tears over the life of an older woman whose experienced love and loss.
Let’s talk about the set design for a second. Even though I was at the very top, I still had a decent view of the set. I was impressed with how much was packed into the set. There was a TON of scene changes, and the set provided clever design to create those scenes and it’s transitions. Everything was multipurpose. The stairs were the most multipurpose set piece in the whole show, serving as different bars, a street light, a barrier, and a transition piece. It was so useful to store away props and set up different scenes depending on where it was placed on the stage. This set design also did well in camouflaging doors and lights. I was amazed with how well the doors were hidden, in the back wall and the chalkboard.
Overall, it was interesting to see how theatrical the actual operation was. They created a person, with a name and a backstory. With given circumstances, as we say in the theatre. This team had to make this corpse a real person to deceive a group of people into believing a lie. Which is what theatre is in a way. Actors pretend to be someone else to achieve being believable to their audience. They went shopping for receipts, creating documents, and creating the life of a man who was never alive. Solely to fool the Germans into believing a story that ended up saving so many lives
Operation Mincemeat is such an incredible show. I have taken so much inspiration from its set design and storytelling. I hope to see more shows that challenge me to think outside the box of what theatre can do.
Farewell friends!!
Theatre in London U of A 