Operation Mincemeat, the most recent Olivier Award-winning Best Musical, will open on Broadway in 2025 after two sold-out years (and counting) on the West End.
Directed by Robert Hastie and choreographed by Jenny Arnold, Operation Mincemeat will begin performances at the Golden Theatre on Saturday, February 15, 2025, with an official opening night of Thursday, March 20.
The musical is written and composed by the comedy group SpitLip featuring David Cumming, Felix Hagan, Natasha Hodgson and Zoë Roberts. Casting for the Broadway premiere will be announced soon.
The synopsis: It’s 1943, and the Allied Forces are on the ropes. Luckily, they’ve got a trick up their sleeve. Well, not up their sleeve, per se, but rather inside the pocket of a stolen corpse. Equal parts farce, thriller, and Ian Fleming-style spy caper (with an assist from Mr. Fleming himself), Operation Mincemeat tells the wildly improbable and hilarious true story of the covert operation that turned the tide of WWII.
The musical takes its inspiration from a true World War II story, in which British intelligence obtained the body of a tramp who had died from eating rat poison. The corpse was dressed as an officer of the Royal Marines and fake war plans were placed in his pockets for German intelligence to find.
In a joint statement, SplitLip said, “If we had to name one single unifying influence for Operation Mincemeat, it would be the American Musical Comedy. The Producers, Guys & Dolls, Wicked, Avenue Q, The Book Of Mormon – we never dreamed we would even get to go see shows like these on Broadway, let alone open our show alongside them. Thank you to our fans, and particularly those in the US for getting Operation Mincemeat here. If it gets hounded out of Broadway after one night, it will still be beyond our wildest dreams. Our producers, we’d imagine, would be less pleased.”
Operation Mincemeat began as a tiny (and tiny-budgeted) production at London’s New Diorama Theatre, where it attracted a devoted following. From there it played sold-out runs at Southwark Playhouse and Riverside Studios before finally premiering in the West End on May 9, 2023 at the Fortune Theatre, where it continues to play to standing-room-only crowds. Operation Mincemeat went on to earn six 2024 Olivier Award nominations, winning Best New Musical and Best Actor in a Supporting Role in a Musical.
Operation Mincemeat is produced on Broadway by Avalon (in association with SpitLip). The show was commissioned by New Diorama Theatre, co-commissioned by The Lowry, and also supported by the Rhinebeck Writers Retreat.