‘Operation Mincemeat' Review: The Stiff Who Saved Europe
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.
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