‘Operation Mincemeat’ is a musical farce about fooling Hitler — with nothing much to say about Nazis
The delightful musical erases its main character’s Jewishness, and much of his true motivation
Natasha Hodgson (center, in a chalk-stripe suit) plays Ewen Montagu — and many others — in Operation Mincemeat Photo by Julieta Cervantes
By PJ Grisar March 20, 2025
In “Making a Man,” a much-reprised number in the West End musical Operation Mincemeat, the agents at MI5 gush over the attributes of their boy “Bill” — a corpse with a completely manufactured backstory.
The fictional Royal Marine Major William Martin was able to wrestle lions and look smart in a suit, “a dependable dreamboat, a shining example of what humans can be.”
His country needs him. Or, more accurately, his body, which a submarine will wash ashore to Spain, handcuffed to a suitcase stuffed with documents to convince the Nazis of Allied plans to invade Greece and Sardinia, when they are actually headed for Sicily.
The scheme to acquire this cadaver and the subterfuge that followed are the thrust of the Olivier award-winning musical, newly arrived to Broadway with an unmissable canary-yellow marquee. Performed by a cast of five, playing dozens, it’s a glitzy, riotous affair with box-stepping, bedazzled blood splatter and a biplane with a swastika-shaped propeller in the finale.
While the characters work overtime to flesh out Major Martin’s backstory, the show pays less attention to the actual traits of a real-life man at the center of the story, who the actors, writers and composers, a quartet called SpitLip, have determined will be decidedly less heroic.
One of the brains behind the operation, Ewen “Monty” Montagu, as played brilliantly by co-conceiver Natasha Hodgson, is a callow, inept, vainglorious, self-absorbed brinksman with a pedigree as vast as his entitlement. He is sexist, elitist and clueless about the Navy, in which he serves as Lieutenant Commander. One of his lines — that the body they’ve used, of a vagrant who ate rat poison, belongs to someone who “didn’t matter” — is so cruel that it draws gasps from the crowd.
You wouldn’t know — and you may not expect a true accounting of history from a farce that boasts a running joke about newt genitalia — that Montagu was a lawyer by profession and no dilettante when it came to intelligence work. You’d suspect even less that he was Jewish, as his onstage counterpart is primarily motivated by the promise of honors like a Victoria Cross, rather than the desire to save his country, its conscripts and his coreligionists.
As Michael Medved wrote in a Commentary article timed to the 2022 film of Operation Mincemeat (a quite good drama by John Madden with two Mr. Darcies — Colin Firth as Montagu, Matthew Macfadyen as his partner in deception Charles Cholmondeley) — the real Montagu was from a prominent Jewish family much involved in civic and religious life.
His grandfather Samuel Montagu — born Montagu Samuel — was a Liverpool-born banker, philanthropist and liberal MP raised to the peerage as the first Baron Swaythling in 1907. He spoke Yiddish to his constituents and joined 51 congregations on London’s East End by launching the Federation of Synagogues.
English through and through, Ewen’s father, Louis, helped found the League of British Jews, formed after the Balfour Declaration to resist the idea that Jews were a separate nationality in need of their own state away from the Isles.
The Cambridge-educated Ewen — there is some truth to the musical’s MI5 being a kind of posh club for Cantabridgians, who sing “your father gave you courage, also ponies and that yacht” — would write a best-selling book about Mincemeat, The Man Who Never Was, and in the postwar serve as president of the United Synagogue. He also worked for restitution for Holocaust survivors as president of the Anglo-Jewish Association. (For all its absurdity, the musical somehow has no interest in Montagu’s other endeavors, which included codifying the rules of ping-pong and seeking “whale’s milk cheese” for his cheese-eaters’ club.)
Montagu’s wealth did not insulate him from antisemitism, nor was he blind to what the Third Reich meant for him personally should England fall. As Ben Macintyre wrote in his 2010 history Operation Mincemeat, “as one of the country’s most prominent Jewish banking families, Ewen knew the Montagu clan faced special peril in the event of a Nazi invasion,” and so he sent his wife and two of his children to safety in the United States.
Of his wartime operation, Montagu once quipped, “joy of joys to anyone, and particularly a Jew, the satisfaction of knowing they had directly and specifically fooled that monster.”
But while Operation Mincemeat the musical has been likened to the oeuvre of Mel Brooks, it is not The Producers or even To Be or Not to Be.
Mincemeat minces words when it comes to the Nazis and their ideology. They appear only briefly, performing a light-cue-intensive dance number a la BTS at the top of Act II. They sing of “ridding Germany of vermin” and “sending adrenaline to the Aryan blood in your veins.” But the primary threat of the Nazis is as a generic enemy to a British democracy that falls short of its ideals when it comes to women or the working class.
Also opposed to democracy: the Soviets, to whom we’re led to believe Montagu — via his brother filmmaker brother, Ivor, in fact a spy — is leaking files on the operation. (Never mind the pesky fact that the Soviets were at that point on the same side of the war and that this intel isn’t the sort that would benefit them when the alliance unravelled.)
Not short of clever humor, the musical’s satire — beyond the Etonian snobbery and rote sexism around the typing pool — is toothless, having just more than nothing to say about ascendent fascism or the fact that, on the morning of the Sunday I saw it, X was brimming with clips of Hitler revisionism on Joe Rogan and Ye teased his new album art: a red swastika.
But then, that is asking for something altogether different from a fundamentally frivolous look at a bizarre war tactic and the human being, long overlooked, who made the ploy possible.
It is, in the end, a distinctly Anglo take on World War II, now playing to Broadway house with a much more Jewish makeup than back home in London — though, at least in this iteration, little things like the Blitz go unmentioned.
Director Robert Hastie and the rest of the team fretted that the show was too British for a transfer, and while it isn’t so English as to confound Americans, its priorities are in a different place than, say, Cabaret, a few blocks north.
To make Montagu a man concerned about the obliteration of his people is a hard thing to spin into comedy. It’s easier to deploy him as a blustery egomaniacal foil to his diffident coward of a partner, Cholmondeley (SpitLip’s David Cumming). In that tried-and-true pairing, if little else, Mincemeat does owe a debt to The Producers.
It is notable that Montagu’s granddaughter Sarah thinks that he would have loved it: “Grandpa was a great believer in not taking himself too seriously” she wrote in 2022, and the show “conveys the sheer enjoyment Grandpa and his team had in coming up with creative and unlikely ways to fool the Germans.”
With jazzy ear-worms and a poignant showstopper in which MI5 secretary Hester Legatt (Jak Malone) dictates a letter to the agency’s fictive serviceman, Mincemeat is supremely entertaining. The ensemble is indefatigable, the stagecraft is inventive and the slapstick sublime. One can see why it has a fanatical following across the pond in the home of Monty Python.
Yet one can’t help but miss the particularly Jewish joy Montagu felt duping the Führer.
By the grand finale, where Hodgson’s Monty dances before the urine-yellow curtain, I half-wished I was watching Jews take the piss out of Hitler instead. As the true Montagu knew, it hits different that way.
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