“It’s a quietly queer show,” Cumming said.

They auditioned for two more singers, a high tenor and a high soprano, then began to divvy up the dozens of roles - secretaries, sailors, a Russian spy, Ian Fleming - among the five performers, with men often playing women’s roles and women playing men’s, without camp or fanfare. “We needed to make sure it didn’t feel old,” Cumming said.Ĭumming, Hodgson and Roberts knew that they would star, for financial reasons as much as creative ones. The song that closes the first act transitions between sea chantey and electronic dance music, the EDM a play on a submarine’s pinging sonar. The resulting score is eclectic, moving among pop, R&B, stride piano. Hagan had considered restricting himself to period forms, then rejected that restriction.

There were several discussions about musical style. The collaborators would take turns riding an exercise bike, just to keep warm. Some of that writing was done in an unheated studio space. Which gave the company a hectic and unglamorous nine months to write it. On the strength of a scene and two songs, the show was booked into a five-week run at London’s New Diorama Theater. Because, as a character in the musical would later say of the Mincemeat plan, “It’s bizarre, it’s disgusting, it’s borderline psychopathic.” (Cumming described a World War II story as “the least cool thing you can do.”) But on learning the details, everyone was persuaded. She told her colleagues that they were going to have to write a musical about World War II. “I was just like, oh my God, this is the craziest, most amazing, hilarious, horrifying story I’ve ever heard,” Hodgson said. “We had to take the truth out because it was too silly,” the composer Felix Hagan, another member of SpitLip said. They especially doubted the dummy Sherman tanks, which the Allies created to misdirect the Germans. And during early performances, the audience had doubts. “Part of the joy was that the crazy stuff was all true,” said Natasha Hodgson, a member of the theater collective SpitLip, which created the show.īut there was so very much crazy stuff. It describes how, in 1942, British Intelligence outfitted an unclaimed corpse as a member of the Royal Marines and delivered the body to the shores of Spain, trusting that German sympathizers would study faked documents planted on the body. At one time, those tanks were a feature of “Operation Mincemeat,” a punchy, plucky, highly unlikely West End musical, which tells the even more unlikely story of an MI-5 escapade.

Dark darker yet darker piano