BRINGING A DEAD MAN TO LIFE

A brilliantly directed tale of brilliant misdirection

Mariah Copeland, Luke Antony Neville, Katie Kleiger, Jake Bentley Young, Erin Ramirez

The Tony and Olivier award-winning Operation Mincement: A New Musical, like the wartime operation it depicts, is the result of a group effort, with book, lyrics, and music by David Cumming, Felix Hagan, Natasha Hodgson, and Zoë Roberts, a foursome calling themselves SpitLip. With origins on the London Fringe and a trajectory to Broadway by way of the West End, Mincemeat is now on tour, and the Broadway in Boston production, directed by Robert Hastie (bringing his work from Broadway to the tour), lives up to the hype.

The tale of a 1943 MI5 effort to mislead Hitler’s army to allow an Allied invasion of Italy involves a series of complex arrangements, all hinging on the ability of a team of men and women (not necessarily played by performers of the corresponding gender) to construct a convincing backstory for a corpse. Likewise, the play succeeds in making something substantial from a small cast and (most of the time) simple staging.

Jake Bentley Young, Mariah Copeland, Erin Ramirez, Luke Antony Neville, Katie Kleiger

Five performers perform 80 roles, and they often do it with the most minimal changes in costume (Ben Stones, set and costume design)—or sometimes with none at all. In one particularly impressive sequence, we repeatedly move from the bowels of a submarine to a Covent Garden dance club simply through repeated changes in lighting (Mark Henderson, lighting design). The set (mostly, but not always, a windowless basement war room) is simple as well; a portable chalk board is a major prop and used very effectively. The music, heavy on keys, supports and doesn’t overpower the lyrics or the story.

Luke Anthony Neville as Hester Leggatt provides a show-stopping highlight with his delivery of “Dear Bill,” a song that has little in the way of vocal pyrotechnics but is devastating in its emotional punch. Mariah Copeland, Katie Kleiger, Erin Ramirez, and Jake Bentley Young round out the cast to bring distinct personalities, each with its own anxieties and agenda, to the MI5 team as well as fulfilling numerous other functions to move the story along.

Mariah Copeland, Luke Antony Neville, Katie Kleiger Jake Bentley Young, Erin Ramirez

I’m not quite on board with those who have deemed the show “the best musical” they’ve ever seen. I found a couple of the numbers, especially “Das Übermensch” and “A Glitzy Finale,” beside the point. Even so, I would happily join the ranks of the Mincefluencers (those who have seen the show multiple times) in hailing the production as fully satisfying and “jolly well done.”

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photos by Matthew Murphy

Operation Mincemeat: A New Musical
national tour
Emerson Colonial Theatre
2 hours and 30 minutes including intermission
ends on October 25, 2026 in Boston
for tickets ($40–$150), visit Broadway in Boston
tour continues; for dates and cities, visit Operation Mincemeat

for more shows, visit Theater in Chicago

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BIO: Lynne Weiss is a member of the Boston Theater Critics Association. Her reviews, travel tales, and progressively optimistic opinions are on her substack.