LONDON — They didn’t know much about musicals while writing what turned out to be the funniest one in London.
“We don’t really come from a very musical theater background,” said Natasha Hodgson, who is among the performers-conceivers-songwriters of “Operation Mincemeat,” the musical. “We don’t dislike musicals. Like, we’ve never been in them. We’ve never, you know, written anything like this.”
“I mean, to be honest,” added David Cumming, another of the project’s multi-hyphenates, “we actually didn't know the rules.”
Breaking the rules, or making up the rules, or simply not realizing that they’d intuited the rules has worked out pretty darn well for these close-knit old friends from “uni” (that’s British-ese for college). Their scrumptio-licious, five-actor show, telling the story of an improbable spy mission that just may have won World War II for the Allies, is the freshest little gem on the West End. There’s talk of a Broadway run. And perhaps the unlikeliest aspect of all is that these musical-theater neophytes have raised the bar for show-tune wit on this scepter’d isle.
“Operation Mincemeat,” the musical, is not to be confused with “Operation Mincemeat,” the 2021 film directed by John Madden, or “Operation Mincemeat,” the 2010 nonfiction book by Ben Macintyre. Those properties are conventionally straightforward accounts of a singular wartime escapade, when British spies planted phony military plans on the body of a man from a morgue. Dressing the corpse as a pilot, the intelligence officers placed it near the wreckage of a plane on the Spanish coast — all to convey misinformation to the Nazis about where an Allied invasion of Italy was to occur. (It worked.)