I expected laughter not tears but this splendid London import elicits both in a stirring mix of vaudeville and valor that can't help but remind audiences that once upon a time, war was mission-driven and strategic.
British comedy isn't usually my thing and for the first several numbers I found Operation Mincemeat, based on historical events, a little difficult to follow, except in the broadest possible terms. World War II intelligence officers, including Ian Fleming (Allison Guinn, definitely playing against James Bond type), line up to pitch ideas for dispatching Hitler, cutting ahead of Charles Cholmondeley (a perfectly elastic Brandon Contreras). A nervous Nellie with a thing for newt anatomy, he's got an out-of-the-box plan to pass along fake intelligence to the Nazis via Spanish Republicans using a dead body which a more polished officer with a secret side gig, (Gerianne Pérez, showboating shamelessly) runs up the flagpole. A junior staffer with ambitions to do more than serve tea (Lexi Rabadi, yearningly feminist) and a secretary of a certain age (a spit-curled Jeff Kready, wearing a pearl lanyard, who embodies Keep Calm and Carry On dignity) join the unlikely team.
Has a talented cast ever worked as hard as these five gender-bending performers who, among them, play at least 50 additional roles, changing costumes at often breakneck speed? The night I saw it, three were stand-ins (Guinn, Pérez and Rabadi) which probably contributed to the undeniable electricity on stage, enough to power a data center.
Two numbers will remain forever etched into my theater-going memory, which stretches all the way back to one of the show's inspirations: "Dear Bill," a faux missive devastatingly sung by Kready, in which English rose gardening becomes a metaphor for the awful human losses incurred by war, and "Useful," a sly, gentle duet (Kready again, with Rabadi) that quietly affirms the value of service and mentorship regardless of recognition and completely devoid of bombast.
The crackerjack creative team, comedians all (David Cumming, Natasha Hodgson, Felix Hagan and Zoe Roberts, the first three of whom also starred in the original cast), manages a feat rare even for theater gods like Hal Prince, Jerome Robbins and Bob Fosse: steadily building engagement and excitement from beginning to end. This includes kicking off the second act with a show stopping Gestapo rap ("whose side are you on?" asks Guinn, after the audience bursts into ecstatic applause). But "A Glitzy Finale," as delightful as the number that ended A Chorus Line (which opened exactly half a century before Operation Mincemeat debuted on Broadway) also makes time to pay tribute to the homeless Welshman whose body facilitated the Allied invasion of Sicily, something that the creators of Dead Outlaw, another terrific corpse show, skipped.
I left the Golden Theater remembering an Armistice Day visit to London in 2016, when red poppies, representing a traumatized nation's desire for a permanent end to the mass slaughter caused by World War I, were pinned to people's lapels and scattered across fountains nearly a century later. At precisely 11 a.m., the entire country stopped to observe two-minute silence in remembrance of the "glorious dead."
That startling commemoration, just three days after Trump's first election, thrilled me with nostalgia for a time when we could both honor history and learn from it. Like one of the Operation Mincemeat team says (if only to scattered applause):
If people like us just blindly follow orders, the fascists won't need to bash the door down. They'll have already won.
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