More 'Mincemeat': FELIX HAGAN at 54Below (& After)

Underlying my admiration for Operation Mincemeat, the new musical from London that this past week became a multi-Tony-nominee, was one unanswered question: Who is Felix Hagan, the guy credited as Mincemeat’s co-creator and nominal composer? I know he is the fourth member of SpitLip, the consortium that jointly wrote Operation Mincemeat, but the other three SpitLip-pers are up there onstage at the Golden Theatre.

Where’s Felix?

At 54Below, as it turned out, for one night only. I scooted to catch him.

I found him alone at a baby grand, a hiply bearded young gent in a monogramed, open-throated white dress shirt and red velvet dinner jacket, welcoming and slightly wickedly grinning beneath a coronet of rocker curls.

His first song was called “Hello Cloud.”

Hello, you great big rainy bastard
I swear you are the last thing that I need
Thundercloud, I see you coming at me fast
You're gonna rain down some disaster over me.
Been frightened by the lightning
Got drenched in freezing rain
Tornado snapped my kite string
And blew it far away
But storms are just a fever
A fever that will break
This too will pass, believe it
Hold on for goodness sake.

The march-time was familiar Operation Mincemeat meter, and the melody recalled the show’s stirring sea shanty, “Sail On, Boys,” but the sentiment was infinitely more personal. This man was staring down depression in a song; singing it down in a crescendoing power ballad.

His next-up was “Some Kind of Hero,” a catchy, disco-ish boogie on a similar depression-defeating theme, commencing with another “cold and lonely thundercloud” that somehow manages to get bouncy.

It seemed instantly clear that Felix Hagan likes to explore the darker side of Operation Mincemeat’s relentless comicality, and is one consummate musician; both classicist and crazy cat. His songwriting is fervent, his pianism imposing — alternately fleet or raucous, tender or baroque. He loves the sounds of the 1970s and can sing like Billy Joel, with a higher range; Elton John, with a purer tone; or even David Bowie, brought to earth. I think he can probably sing like anyone he chooses.

He also has a lot to say between songs, an endearing exhalation of explications and tangents.

Then came “Dead in the Water,” Mincemeat’s quick-change pièce de résistance, a stream-of-consciousness tour de force of ADHD riffing for the show’s scientifically brilliant, socially challenged, MI5 intelligence officer, Charles Cholmondeley (pronounced Chumley) — as played…no, as embodied in Operation Mincemeat by the hilariously hyperactive SpitLip-per, David Cumming.

And there they were suddenly — Cholmondeley and Cumming (figuratively) and Felix Hagan (literally), side-by-side on 54Below’s stage. And, it seemed, they were one.

It was quite uncanny. David Cumming’s over-the-top mannerisms and gestures, his clenched voice, his eye-popping desperation as Cholmondeley seemed to reside in, or have been derived from Felix Hagan. Hagan was Cholmondeley and/or Cumming, or vice versa. I was enthralled, and now really curious.

Which is why I chased down Mr. Hagan long-distance from London shortly thereafter for a little talk.

My first question: Why aren’t you up there with your mates on Broadway?

“The simple answer is that nobody asked me,” he replied, guffawing heartily. “And, because I’m not good enough.

Before I could press him, he elaborated:

“Every single one of them, you see, can deliver a speech as a fully-fleshed-out, yet utterly ridiculous character, and then turn their head and be someone else completely; both real and heightened. It’s just bloody astonishing. I never wanted to be an actor. I just came in as an autistic man, obsessed with music, who has spent his entire life trying to swim deeper and deeper into the world of tonality and harmony and rhythm, to let it flow through every one of my veins until music pours forth. That is kind of my mission.” He paused for breath. “Also I could never perform exactly the same thing every single night for a year. That just gives me the horrors!”

YouTube testifies to a vigorous Hagan solo career. How did he hook up with this lot in the first place?

“My musical education was so bananas. I was educated in so many different spaces. I was a big band jazz drummer and then I was a rock singer and then I played electric guitar in a million different situations and then there was musical theater. It's like I rose up out of all of these things.”

But, how…

“ ‘Tash’ [SpitLip’s Natasha Hodgson] was lead singer in my band, Felix Hagan and the Family,” he continued blithely. “I went to this play of hers, The Boy Who Kicked Pigs, presented by her theater company, which was called Kill the Beast and included David [Cumming] and ‘Bob’ [Zoë Roberts], who would one day all become SpitLip. I went in with the understandably low expectations of someone who's watched a lot of terrible plays by friends. But it turned out to be one of the best things I'd ever seen; it was brilliant beyond even the bounds of friendship; it was brilliant globally! I just couldn't believe how funny it was. Then they came back the next year with an even funnier show, and then they came back the next year and said, ‘Hey, we want this new show to have some songs in; it's not a musical, but the plot requires a couple of songs. Do you want to write them with us?’ And I gave out the most loud and instant ‘Yes!’ I've ever barked in my life. Then we wrote some songs together and it turned out we had the same unstoppable nonsense machine running at all times within us. I'd be at the piano and we'd be constructing a song, and it would just explode into being, in a shower of glitter and bollocks. It was so funny and so silly. And we were all creating together. I could just throw something at them that, literally, any other member of the human race would cringe away from, and these people would grab it and just let it blossom into something truly stupendous, with a complete lack of self consciousness, a complete rejection of coolness, relentlessly in pursuit of ridiculousness and hilarity.”

Did he write all of Operation Mincemeat’s music? Or are the melodies, like the lyrics, truly the product of the four of them?

“Oh, God, yes, we wrote it all together!” he exclaimed. “Because we all come from the fringes of everything — from the fringes of music, and the fringes of theater, where it doesn't matter where an idea comes from. Like, who cares? If someone's got a good idea about any part of the process, then it gets voiced, and if it's good enough, then it goes in. Of course, we all have our specialisms within that — as a man who, in every cell of my body, is utterly obsessed with music, and if any bit of it is wrong, it's like a knife driving into my brain… well, that is where I live. But every single part of this show has passed through all four brains. I can honestly say it was written by all of us.”

How?

“Well, we developed a working practice, I’d say, before a single key was pressed on the piano, before a single lyric went down on the page: We would just talk — about the song we wanted to write, about the story circumstances surrounding it and the characterizations, for hours and hours and hours, until we found the perfect little nugget to encapsulate what the song was about — usually a lyric refrain, which I took to calling ‘the seed,’ in the manner of Cole Porter or Lionel Bart, that little refrain you keep coming back to that summarizes the whole vibe of the song. Once we had that, when you’ve got character actors as unbelievably strong as those three, it just took off.”

So, which came first, I wondered, David Cumming or Felix Hagan — in terms of Cholmondeley?

“I'm assuming you're referring to “Dead in the Water,” Mr. Hagan smiled, “which is a solo moment for a deeply neurotic man, who is — and this is my reading of it — a very autism-coded character. The whole lyric bit in the middle: “I wish I was a maggot, or a tadpole, or a termite,” — that is the autistic thought-spiral. Now, when you bring together someone with a wonky-shaped brain like myself, and the living embodiment of this character growing before your eyes, in David, it's like rocket fuel for ideas. It’s a gift! Soon you find yourself singing like Dave — the character now has the voice he has given it. I can't sing that song any other way. It's not like I'm impersonating Dave, or he’s impersonating me. Cholmondeley is the character we came up with together. Does that make sense?”

It did.

Mr. Hagan has a solo album coming out soon, Happy Songs, and he performed much of it at 54Below, alongside other terrific originals, including my personal favorite, an anthemic rocker titled, “Gene Kelly” (“I want to dance like Gene Kelly, dress like Elton John.”). Finally, however, he landed inevitably on the song that looms largest in Operation Mincemeat — the heartbreaking letter song, “Bill,” written in the show and sung by MI5’s humble secretarial-pool chief, Hester Leggatt, as played by Jak Malone, whose performance just earned him a Tony nomination.

“I'll tell you this,” Mr. Hagan murmured, “that song did not make me cry until I saw Jakkie-boy do it on Broadway. From the first, Jak was able to sing every note like he was a middle-aged woman wrestling with decades-old, massive grief, and it truly blew me away. But when I saw Jak singing it on Broadway, I suddenly felt just how much it meant to him. You know the way that we play with gender in the show, all of the absurdity that we put around that song in order to frame its sincerity, in order for it to land in the way it does. That was all Jak. Amongst us clowns, Jak brought unadorned feeling. I've known him since he was 16. Even then, he was just a star! And to see that star explode in such an astonishing way on Broadway. I just let myself feel it. I let myself feel his emotion, and yeah, it really got me.”

One might say the same for all of us in the audience. Not just listening to “Bill,” which may be the most emotionally compelling theater song since Jonathan Larson’s “Seasons of Love,” but also to “Sail on Boys,” which Mr. Hagan closed his 54Below show with, in a grand group sing-along. “Sail on Boys” is, on the surface, just another sea shanty, but, as I confessed to Mr. Hagan, it makes me weep.

Mr. Hagan grinned happily. “I'm obsessed with writing songs that chime the huge, deep bells that live within us all,” he said. And left it at that.