"MINCEMEAT" & CHURCHILL
I’ve already written glowingly (HERE, almost two years ago) about Operation Mincemeat, the wonderfully unlikely new musical from London that just opened on Broadway to mostly rave reviews (one sour N.Y. Times reviewer notwithstanding). I was bowled over by the show when I caught it in the West End — a daft, and, at times, surprisingly moving, song and dance extravaganza depicting an off-the-wall undercover World War II espionage escapade overseen by Winston Churchill. Seeing Mincemeat again in NYC, I found it virtually unchanged — still subversively ingenious, and just as lovable.
One bemused thought did tickle me, though, both in London and even more incessantly here at home — given my day gig as owner of Chartwell Booksellers, the world’s only Winston Churchill bookstore.
What would Churchill think about all of this?
Winston Churchill actually watches over Operation Mincemeat (a painting of him literally unfurls onstage), much as he watched over the even more unlikely World War II mission, code-named “Mincemeat,” that lends the musical its plot, characters and much of its cheeky irreverence. The wacky songs, the rapping Nazi Storm troopers, the cross-dressing, dancing spies who make up Operation Mincemeat’s gender-inverting action are all in service to “Winston.”
All three of Operation Mincemeat’s original conceivers appear as characters in the musical — MI5 intelligence officers Charles Cholmondeley (pronounced Chumley), Ian Fleming (yes, the future author/inventor of James Bond) and the man who later took most of the credit for the mission, Ewen Montagu — the latter two played by women in Saville Row suits.
Their joint scheme, approved by the P.M., called for a real dead body to be dropped into the sea off Spain, freighted with an invented identity as a downed RAF pilot and shackled to a briefcase containing bogus Allied invasion plans pointing toward Greece and Sardinia, instead of the actual invasion destination, Sicily. Against all odds (and logic), the ruse worked. Neutral-but-Fascist Spain fished out the body, and turned the plans over to the Nazis. Hitler wound up diverting seven German divisions to Greece, personally.
Operation Mincemeat “The Musical” quite inadvertently combines two of Winston Churchill’s favorite (and virtually lone) wartime diversions: Spycraft and song. Yes, Winston Churchill sang. “On occasions when affairs looked overblack,” one secretary who worked closely with him during the war observed, “Mr. Churchill… would sing an appropriate verse or two” from one of his old Harrow school songs, “and then get back to business.” He also loved to sing in the tub, where he frequently worked. He had a prodigious memory for the lyrics of Music Hall tunes from his youth and patter songs from the Savoy Operas of Gilbert and Sullivan.
Beyond song (and spycraft), though, the thing that might have endeared Operation Mincemeat most to Winston Churchill, surprisingly, is the show’s pointed gender-play. Churchill, you see, alongside his immense achievements (and not insignificant occasional misjudgments), was a steadfast supporter, if not an advocate, for a wide range of men we would today characterize as LGBTQ+. He was a vocal admirer of the disgraced Oscar Wilde, whose trials for “indecency” Churchill was old enough to have monitored in real time. He was a champion throughout World War I (and after) of the soldier-poet Siegfried Sassoon, despite warnings from Churchill’s own brother that Sassoon’s overt homosexuality (and avowed abhorrence of war) might damage Churchill’s career. He remained close to T.E. Lawrence, despite widespread disapproval within the government and military of “Lawrence of Arabia”’s homoerotic behavior. Most intimately, Churchill’s longtime private secretary, pre-World War II, and life-long friend, Edward Marsh, was also a prominent literary patron and aesthete who never shied publicly from his own affection for men, at a time when homosexuality in Great Britain was still an imprisonable crime. Winston Churchill’s own mother warned him away from Eddie Marsh. But Churchill took no notice.
Evolved over some four years in fringe theaters around London, Operation Mincemeat is the wholly original creation of four young writer/performers working under the group name SpitLip, comprising David Cumming (who plays Cholmondeley and others), Natasha Hodgson (Montagu, etc.), Zoë Roberts (Fleming, et. al.) and the composer Felix Hagan. Feeling their careers were stalling, the four concocted, in semi-desperation, their own over-the-top Mincemeat script, music and lyrics, inspired by a Stuff You Should Know podcast about the real Operation Mincemeat. Performed entirely by SpitLip (abetted by two other shape-shifting actor collaborators, Jak Malone and Claire-Marie Hall), Operation Mincemeat made its way from the London fringe to the West End buoyed by increasingly great reviews and, stunningly, won the 2024 Olivier Award as Best New Musical. This propelled it to Broadway, where SpitLip, Malone and Hall are still performing it all; inhabiting and discarding characters in a whirlwind of brazen costume changes and discreet shifts in posture, accent and gender attitude.
Their reverse-gender role-playing is utterly matter of fact, though the mere fact of it becomes an inescapable comment on gender roles then, and now.
I decided to ask them about this. And about Winston Churchill.
To my delight, they answered.
“Can a female body occupy a male space, or vice versa? That’s what we explore,” responded Mr. Malone, who stops the show nightly as MI5’s humble secretarial-pool chief, Hester Leggatt, singing “Dear Bill,” a heartbreaking faked letter song, based on an actual letter the real Leggatt wrote for Operation Mincemeat’s fictional dead flyer to carry with him from his fictional fiancé. The performance won Mr. Malone an Olivier Award.
“My character was a real MI5 secretary named Jean Leslie,” noted Ms. Hall. “I sing a song, “Useful,” about Jean’s hopeless desire to be acknowledged like a man for her contribution to Operation Mincemeat. Her frustrated fantasy all comes down to the lyric: ‘And then Winston goes: We’d be lost without you.’”
“Operation Mincemeat is about every single person's opportunity to make a difference, no matter how small,” Ms. Roberts pointed out. “That's what Churchill always spoke of, isn’t it?”
“I think he would have been admiring of the process we've taken,” Ms. Hodgson concluded. “We started with nothing except this stubborn, bloody-minded belief in ourselves. Just like him.”
As for dealing with Winston Churchill onstage directly? Mr. Cumming admitted that, “Corporealizing Churchill ultimately seemed a really bad idea. In the end, we reduced him to a painting.”
It is a painting that anchors the show, an image of Churchill gazing down upon Operation Mincemeat — including its personal choices — with equanimity. Much like the real Winston Churchill.