INTERVIEW: It’s your mission to catch ‘Operation Mincemeat’
Photo: Jak Malone and Zoë Roberts star in Operation Mincemeat on Broadway. Photo courtesy of Julieta Cervantes / Provided by O&M DKC with permission.
NEW YORK — Operation Mincemeat, the new musical playing at the Golden Theatre on Broadway, is the type of theatrical story that comes along once in a generation. This humorous take on a real-life World War II story began in a tiny theater in London, with the creators doubling as actors in the show, and by sheer word of mouth, momentum for the musical kept growing and growing. Eventually, Operation Mincemeat, directed by Robert Hastie, transferred to the West End, where it continues to play, and then hopped across the pond to take over Broadway.
Now, the musical shows no signs of stopping, with its limited engagement continuously being extended, with performances now running well into 2026. The show was written by David Cumming, Felix Hagan, Natasha Hodgson and Zoë Roberts, with all but Hagan also performing in the piece at the Golden.
For Roberts, these past few years have been dreamlike. On stage, she portrays several characters in this spy thriller, but her main role is that of Johnny Bevan. She was nominated for an Olivier Award for her performance and is absolutely delighted to be based in New York City for this run.
“I think we’re still wrapping our heads around it even as we’re doing the show eight times a week,” Roberts said of the Midtown Manhattan experience. “We came out here kind of going, ‘Who knows what’s going to happen? What are you doing here? What are you talking about, you crazy Brits?’ But, yeah, we’ve just been absolutely bowled over by the response of the show and just so, so happy to still be here and to be getting the reception that we’re getting.”
As Roberts tells the story, Operation Mincemeat’s success was truly unexpected, especially to the creators. The team got together way back when and created a piece of musical theater that found a home in a small London theater called the New Diorama; there are only 80 seats in this gem of a theatrical space.
“We barely had the West End in our sights,” she said with a laugh. “We’ll make this show because we want to make a musical, and we think there’s something really exciting here. Maybe a producer will see this and, who knows, pay us the money to make a second one. We never really thought this one would necessarily be the one that hits and works. Even getting to the West End felt incredible.”
But the West End did eventually happen. They took over the Fortune Theatre, which was the longtime home ofThe Woman in Black. There’s something about this theater that apparently loves long runs. The Woman in Black lasted decades, and Operation Mincemeat has been a tenant for years.
“[Now] we’re in the incredibly gorgeous John Golden Theatre in New York, and it’s 800 seats,” Roberts said. “And it’s only five people on stage, and it was built on intimacy and very old-school stagecraft and not a lot of money. And to kind of go, hey, we’re going to upscale it. Now it’s on this bigger stage, and it’s in front of so many more people. Is this still going to work? Because I think we’ve always retained that the heart of the show is all of that stuff, it is what it always was in that 80-seater. It’s a group of five people telling an incredible story with a little more glitz and glamour because it’s Broadway, for God’s sake.”
As press notes indicate, the actual Operation Mincemeat was an espionage mission to disguise the 1943 invasion of Sicily, but the way that Roberts and her fellow cast mates tell the story, this historical tale is filled with coincidence, happenstance and farce, even while the world was coming undone and malignant forces were on the rise.
“It’s such a British story, and our style of storytelling, our humor I think is very British,” she said. “”There was this sense of like, is it going to be too British for Broadway? I think we just came over as the writers very prepared to work. We love adapting stuff. We love being on our feet and tweaking things and changing things. It’s part of the joy and the endless hell of being in it when you write it, but you do have the possibility of going, ‘Oh, I can just change what I’m going to say here tonight. Let’s try that out,’ so we came very ready to adapt.”
In the end, the only changes between the London show and the Broadway version were minor. Roberts said the modifications were mostly cosmetic. For example, they changed the reference “#10” to “Downing Street.”
“We could clarify that a little bit for an audience to make that joke land or that point go across, but, no, from the first preview, we were like, ‘This is working. They get it,'” the actor said. “I think American audiences are so tuned in to theater and musical theater. They’re so smart, and so they lean forward in a way here that’s really lovely. They really engage, and they kind of grasp the story with both hands. We were delighted to not have to do as much work as we thought.”
Roberts, who is part of the dark comedy troupe Kill the Beast, said it has been a joy portraying Johnny Bevan on stage. He’s the boss in the room, and she loves the chance of exuding that power.
“I like to say that in a lot of stories he would be the enemy,” she said. “He would be the bad guy because he’s kind of the person whose job it is to walk into the room and go, ‘You guys need to calm down.’ … He’s constantly saying, ‘Look, you need to take this more seriously. You’re not doing this by the rules. You’re having too much fun. This whole musical, we’re all having too much fun. The stakes are very high. This is very important.’ I think in a lot of shows it would have been very easy to make that person the bad guy, but I love that he’s not the bad guy. He isn’t as fun as some of the other characters on stage, but he’s the person that does remind us of the huge, high stakes of the story, the potential cost of this mission going wrong as much as it going right.”
Roberts added: “We have gender-bending in the show, and there’s a lot of fun to be had within that. But as a woman, it’s really brilliant to go on stage and have power and authority and control, and not in a way that is performative. It’s just embodying a person that walks into a room and because of military rank and hierarchy and the entirety of gender and misogyny, what he says goes in this room, and that’s really fun, particularly that I get to play that alongside a million idiots.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Operation Mincemeat, co-written and starring Zoë Roberts, continues at the Golden Theatre on Broadway. Click here for more information and tickets.
