This musical is so good, someone saw it 327 times. Now it’s coming to Australia

A dressed-up corpse, fake love letters, trout and Ian Fleming. This more or less sums up one of the most bonkers secret missions in history, known as “Operation Mincemeat”. Naturally, a story this absurd can only be told one way: through song, dance and a pinch of glittery fake blood.

The musical Operation Mincemeat, based on that same mission, tells the story of how a group of oddball British agents used a homeless man’s corpse to wrong-foot Adolf Hitler.

The production – written and composed by British theatre group SpitLip, which is often hailed as the “new Monty Python” – has taken both the West End and Broadway by storm, and sold more than 1 million tickets worldwide. And it’s coming to Australia in 2027.

The story begins in 1943. The Allies were on the brink of defeat, so they hatched a plan to dress the body of Welshman Glyndwr Michael, who died after ingesting rat poison, as a British officer and drop him off the coast of Spain, an area rife with Nazi spies. The body was paired with a briefcase filled with various documents corroborating his fake identity, as well as “top-secret plans” that indicated the Allies intended to invade Europe via Sardinia instead of their actual entry point, Sicily. Against all odds, the madcap mission worked, redirecting the Nazis, saving countless lives on both sides and helping to turn the tide of World War II.

Operation Mincemeat takes this scarcely believable true story and transforms it into a fast-paced musical romp through history, delivering Nazi boy band pop songs, a Rocky Horror-esque coroner, and more dialogue about newts’ anuses than you’d ever expect in a World War II tale. As if that weren’t already enough to make your head spin, the 80-plus characters are played by just five actors.

“People who’ve been through the British education system had World War II browbeaten into us every day of the year,” says David Cumming, SpitLip’s co-artistic director. “Even in maths, it was like, ‘Two plus Nazi is what?’ But for some reason, we weren’t taught this story. So, we knew it had an interest for the public in that sense, and an interest for us. It’s just such a wild caper. We fell in love with it.”

Despite its strangeness (or perhaps because of it) Operation Mincemeat has blown away both the West End – where the show’s run was extended a record 19 times – and Broadway, boasting more than 180 five-star reviews and winning both Tony and Olivier awards. It’s even said that some MI5 and MI6 agents have seen the show and approved.

Many of the show’s fans, who call themselves “Mincefluencers”, have seen the show dozens of times, with some attempting to complete “cast bingo” sheets by seeing every combination of main cast members and understudies. One super Mincefluencer has seen the show a whopping 327 times.

“We weren’t really prepared for how much our incredible fan base was going to care about these people,” says Zoë Roberts, SpitLip’s co-artistic director, who adds that she can’t get enough of seeing fans dressed up as the campy death-obsessed coroner Spilsbury.

These fans, of which there are thousands across the globe, gather on the Discord app to launch their own “missions”, such as “Operation Charming Man”, which convinced Colin Firth (who starred in the 2021 Operation Mincemeat film) to see the musical, and “Operation Preview One”, in which 300 Mincefluencers serenaded the Broadway cast, complete with an orchestra, at stage door after their first preview. The fans even launched an all-out investigation into the real identity of Hester Leggatt, a favourite of fans, whose wartime role was largely unknown before Operation Mincemeat.

The musical’s dedicated fan base, paired with its incredibly clever script and absurd source material, meant Operation Mincemeat went from a low-budget fringe production in a 77-seat theatre to a global phenomenon. Next year, the musical will commence a national tour in Australia, beginning in Melbourne in September as part of its world tour. Further Australian cities are yet to be announced.

The world tour also includes dates in North America, China, New Zealand and Mexico. The search for the Australian cast will start early next year.

Preposterousness alone can’t get a musical to such heights, however. Among the silliness is a healthy dose of heart. The musical has been applauded for its thoughtful acknowledgement of largely unknown or forgotten people who made a huge difference in World War II: namely Glyndwr Michael.

“We had this question mark around how we honour the man at the heart of it, the homeless man whose body it was,” says Natasha Hodgson, another co-artistic director of SpitLip. It wasn’t until the pandemic, when the group saw first-hand what it was like to feel so small in the face of insurmountable terror, that the ending came together.

“We were like, no matter what, that has to be the thing that lingers when the curtain goes down. These contributions cannot be allowed to be forgotten,” Hodgson says.

The musical has also been lauded as “quietly queer” thanks to its gender-blind casting, as well as feminist due to its emphasis on the unsung female heroes.

“The straight dads come for the war, and everyone else comes for the gender swapping,” director Robert Hastie says. “There’s something in this show that quietly offers people a way of facing a world that may define them in ways they’re uncomfortable with. It says: ‘You can defy expectations and label [yourself] as confidently and happily as this show does’.”

As for Ian Fleming, how does he factor into all this? The James Bond author was an officer in the Royal Navy’s Naval Intelligence Department, and he helped write the “Trout Memo”, which included the very deception “Operation Mincemeat” put into action. According to this document, the deception of an enemy in wartime was comparable to fly-fishing for trout.

This mission helped win the Allies the war and thus changed the course of history. Given that, you’d expect a musical about it to be of similar proportions and earnestness as Les Misérables, Hastie says. It couldn’t be further from that.

“It’s being told by these five miscast idiots,” he says. “You’re willing them to succeed against all odds, both on stage and in the story. It ought to be very serious, but it’s very, very silly … And then it pulls the rug out from under you again in making you care.”

As one of the characters says during the second act: “You couldn’t write it.”

The reporter travelled to London as a guest of the production.

Operation Mincemeat will begin its Australian tour at Melbourne’s Comedy Theatre in September 2027. The ticket waitlist is now open.

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