“Operation Mincemeat,” a Tony Award nominee for best musical, tells the absurdly improbable true story of how a tiny group of misfits in British intelligence diverted the German army in World War II. It’s a comic tale of a plan always on the verge of falling apart, and that’s how it is represented theatrically.
“The show works at the knife edge of what we’re capable of,” said David Cumming, a member of SpitLip, the British theater collective that performs — and wrote and composed — the musical. “It’s the energy of ‘They’re barely pulling this off,’ and to be honest, we barely are.”
Just as the story is hard to believe — a corpse planted with plans for a fictitious Allied invasion of Sardinia threw the Germans off the actual attack on Sicily? — so is the idea that a mere cast of five can tell it, shuffling through a total of 82 characters often across gender and mostly at the speed of farce. Like the military operation it portrays, the theatrical one requires elaborate planning.
For this reason, “Operation Mincemeat,” which was a hit on the West End before opening on Broadway in March, is one of the most tightly choreographed shows imaginable. The performers are in nearly constant motion onstage — acting, singing, dancing, changing costumes and characters, tossing and catching props and rolling pieces of the set around, all in exact coordination with one another, the lighting and the music.
The choreography behind the scenes is equally involved and precise, as I learned when I visited backstage at the Golden Theater during a recent matinee. There was no safe place to stand and watch. My attentive chaperone — Beau Lettieri, the assistant stage manager — had to keep me moving to stay out of the way.
The backstage area is cramped and densely populated. Along with three stage managers, there are four dressers, three prop handlers, two carpenters, two electricians and at times a hair supervisor. Every inch of wall space seems to be lined with set pieces on wheels, each accessorized with hidden props. The wings are festooned with yet more easy-to-grab hats, umbrellas, newspapers. The place looks like an overstuffed curio shop.
“If someone is ever in a slightly different position, you’re thrown off,” said Natasha Hodgson, a writer-performer whose main character is the entitled aristocrat Ewen Montagu. But apart from the stage manager who calls the technical cues, no one has a fixed position. Neither do the set pieces, costumes or props. It’s not just that everything must be in the right place; everything must be in exactly the right place at exactly the right time. “It’s constantly a new puzzle,” Lettieri said.
So for me, an open spot was open only for a moment. I had to stay out of the path of the performers, who were whooshing past, undoing the Velcro and magnets of one costume, stepping into a new one and hurrying back onstage, often while contributing vocal harmony to the song in progress.
But I also had to avoid the stagehands, who were sliding into position at the exact moment to catch a prop thrown by an onstage actor, and the dressers, who were carefully laying out the next costume and perching hats on their own heads (or hats) for easy access. At its most intricate, this process was like an assembly line, as when three actors circling through had framed portraits hung on their necks so that they might momentarily play admirals. They barely stopped moving before they were back out on the battlefield.
This backstage action is strictly coordinated with what’s happening onstage, even as preparations are underway for what will happen later. The stagehands move the largest (and noisiest) set pieces only on the loudest bars of music or right after the jokes that reliably get the biggest laughs. During the quietest, most somber moments of the show — it has a few — all is still and silent.
“Everyone knows the flow,” Lettieri said. Which is why in spite of all the motion, the mood was calm. Cast members knew when they had time to catch their breath and down some water. Crew members knew when to check email or play a game on their phones. As in most Broadway shows, “Operation Mincemeat” has backstage rituals, like the second act striptease that Jak Malone (who plays the secretary Hester Leggatt and has been nominated for best actor in a featured role) performs for the dressers and stagehands, unbuttoning and peeling off a lab coat in time with the music then tossing it onto a hanger.
Being allowed backstage was like being shown a magician’s secrets. When an actor holding a closed umbrella onstage suddenly had an open one, I could see how the swap was managed. But the essence of “Operation Mincemeat” is visible to all. Audiences can see it, for example, in the closing number of the first act, when the cast alternates between being one set of characters in a nightclub and another in a submarine. The change is effected by nothing more than sailor’s watch caps and flashlights (or, in British parlance, torches).
This scene was part of the show from its very beginning, when SpitLip (soon joined by Malone and Claire-Marie Hall, who plays the ambitious clerk Jean Leslie) debuted the first versions of “Mincemeat” at a series of tiny theaters in London.
“I remember swapping with the hat and torch the first time and thinking this is impossible,” said Zoë Roberts, who plays John Bevan, the colonel in charge of the operation, as well Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond. “But then you get dexterous at that, and you go, ‘Well, what could we do to push this?’ And you start adding in.”
Hodgson said, “That number is still the most dangerous area.”
“I think every single one of us has dropped torches,” she added. “But we all have torch sonar now. If one falls, we immediately know whose it is and who has to pick it up and pass it to someone else to get it to the right person in time.”
“If something goes wrong,” Cumming said, “there’s suddenly a second show happening between the five of us working out how to fix things.”
“There’s actually two versions of that,” Malone added. “One is when something goes wrong, and we as a hive mind have solved it and the audience will never know. The other is when something has gone wrong, and we decide, ‘Let’s be silly.’”
These actors have been playing these roles long enough that they can respond to mishaps — like phone cords getting tangled — and improvise in character. “In those moments, the characters expand a little,” Roberts said.
Not that there is much room for expansion or contraction. In rehearsals, if someone came up with an idea for a tiny change, the group would have to talk through what the domino effect would be on the show’s next 10 or 20 minutes. If the director, Robert Hastie, thought a scene was dragging and wanted to speed it up, the actors might have practical objections.
“I was like, ‘Rob, I’m changing an entire character in four seconds. Please don’t make it two,’” Roberts said.
There is also danger, though, in the operation getting too smooth. During the initial West End run — it’s still playing there with different performers — the cast became too adept at one of the more complicated sequences, during which they manically switch between two different locales. Hastie made them do it faster.
“We sometimes have to chuck spanners into the works,” Hastie said. “Because if the audience feels like you’re coasting, then they’ll stop enjoying the perfect synchronicity of form and content. It’s also a basic of comedy that it’s funnier to watch people barely succeeding than to watch them gliding.”
Compared to the intricacy of the staging, the choreography in the narrow sense is, except for one K-pop-inspired number, simple: music-hall box steps, grapevines. “They’re not dancers,” said Jenny Arnold, the show’s choreographer. “You go with what they’re comfortable with, and then you can gradually build from that, and they end up doing things they never thought they would.”
And yet the whole show, Cumming said, is “a five-person dance.” The actors approach their roles physically. “There are so many damn character changes that you don’t have time to say, ‘What is my back story?’ You think, ‘What is the shape of this body?’ And you can’t be lost in your own little character’s world because you always have to be aware of what everyone else is doing.”
This collective performance distinguishes “Mincemeat” from the recent spate of shows, like “The Picture of Dorian Gray” and “Vanya,” in which one actor plays many roles.
“It’s a show where you’re always thinking about the other people onstage,” Hodgson said. “Everyone is both lead and chorus, and you really can’t have an ego because it requires five minds to work as one.”
This is another sense in which form and content mesh. As the lyrics of a sea-shanty-like song in the show say, “If it’s down, it’s down together / If it’s up, it’s up as one.”
“Sometimes people truly don’t believe that there are only five of us,” Cumming said.
“Except that there aren’t only five now,” Hodgson added, referring to the crew.
And to sustain “Operation Mincemeat” over a Broadway run of eight shows a week, understudies are also needed. Since each actor plays so many roles, what Hodgson or Cumming does in the show is called a “track.” An actor learning a track must memorize all the details of the choreography, onstage and off, down to the optimal order in which to stuff props into a pocket. And each of the five understudies must learn multiple tracks.
On May 1, the same day that the Tony nominations were announced, Jessi Kirtley made her Broadway debut in the “Jean” track. The news that she would be going on came to her a few hours before curtain, as she was in a harness rehearsing the “Montagu” track (which involves being hoisted in the air).
“It was wild,” Kirtley said. “The other actors told me, ‘We can cover anything.’”
During the club-submarine number, Kirtley’s cap fell out of her pocket. Hodgson “slyly picked it up and threw it behind her back to Jak, who threw it behind his back to me, and I caught it just when I needed it,” she said.
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