How Operation Mincemeat turned gender-bending history into Broadway gold.

It’s a mystery what happens in an actor’s dressing room right before they take the stage. Every performer has a different ritual, especially when it comes to playing an emotionally taxing role — or in the case of Operation Mincemeat — roles, plural. The Olivier Award-winning musical comedy, about the covert British military operation to divert Nazi troops from Sicily, where the Allies were planning to invade during World War II, requires boundless energy and nuance for the five actors who play over 80 characters in the production. Role changes are communicated to the audience through minor adjustments to costumes and posture. So how does one prepare to take on multiple personalities in this dizzyingly funny production at Broadway’s John Golden Theatre?

The back of the house at a theater may look familiar to those who live in a pre-war building in New York City. Carpeted stairs, a rickety handrail plastered in layers of paint, and most dreadful of all, a steep climb up multiple flights of stairs. David Cumming and Jak Malone, two of the show’s stars, share a dressing room on the top floor. It’s a feat that they do the trek so often. The two are having a conversation as this winded writer greets them both. “Take your time, catch your breath,” Malone says with a hug. Cumming stands from his chair in the middle of powdering his face to usher me into their dressing room. They are half-ready. Malone is in the middle of eating on his side of the room, hair and makeup secured in place, as Cumming carefully applies eyeliner.

Claire-Marie Hall, Zoë Roberts, David Cumming, Natasha Hodgson, and Jak MaloneJulieta Cervantes

The show was written by Natasha Hodgson (who plays Ewen Montagu and others), Zoë Roberts (Johnny Bevan and others), Felix Hagan (he doesn’t appear in the play), and Cumming, who identifies as queer, and they make up the comedy collective SpitLip. “We got together to try our hand, for the first time in our lives, to try and write a commercial piece of theater,” Cumming explains. “The idea was we’d write something good enough that a producer who had a show that they wanted made would then pay us money to make that show.” It was Hodgson who introduced the group to an episode from the Stuff You Should Know podcast about a British military operation during World War II called Operation Mincemeat.

The group dove into research, dividing the work among themselves, and then they’d meet again to “pass it to the left” so that everyone’s work would get “torn apart,” Cumming says. “This is the sixth iteration of the show, so it’s taken six times to get it almost right.”

That work paid off. After winning two Olivier Awards (Britain’s highest award in theater) — for Best New Musical and for Malone as Best Actor in a Supporting Role in a Musical — in addition to a Tony Award, along with multiple nominations, the show is undoubtedly a success.

Operation Mincemeat featured actors in "gender-swapped" roles.Julieta Cervantes

Malone and Claire-Marie Hall (who plays Jean Leslie and others) joined the production later. The former managed to catch the group’s attention by creating some fan art of the members after seeing a SpitLip show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe when he was a drama student. There was an open audition for Operation Mincemeat; he won the cast over and became a part of this ragtag group of comics.

Operation Mincemeat made its world premiere in 2019 at the New Diorama Theatre and moved to various venues in London before landing in the West End, where it received critical praise, 74 five-star reviews, and an eventual transfer to Broadway. Since its nascent days, the musical amassed a rabid online following of fans who call themselves “mincefluencers.”

The show’s main conceit is that the audience is watching a musical comedy about a somewhat weighty topic with gender-swapped performances. “We were worried because [since] we live in a patriarchal, misogynistic society, if you put a man dressed [as] a woman onstage, it’s automatically seen as a comic role,” Cumming says. The members were concerned that having a man in feminine clothing would only provoke laughs even in more serious moments. But once they saw Malone do the production’s showstopper, “Dear Bill,” they knew they had made the right decision.

Jak Malone and Zoë Roberts perform on stage.Julieta Cervantes

The show has changed Malone’s life in more ways than one. Since performing in Operation Mincemeat, he’s become even more interested in the idea of bending gender binaries, he says. “I’ve always been fascinated by the gender of it all, by my own gender, and how some fabrics make me feel more feminine and what shapes make me feel more masculine,” he says. “I’m the most comfortable in my skin I’ve ever been. I feel like my most wonderful blurry-gendered self, and I’m really enjoying it — and I owe Hester a lot for opening that side of me.”

His red carpet looks for press events leading up to and at the Tony nominations saw him outfitted in more feminine clothing alongside his longtime partner, Jasmine. Malone shares that his identity has always been a topic of conversation, as society likes to keep people in boxes. His sexuality is never something he wanted to make a judgment call on, he says, “but queer is the only label I feel comfortable giving myself.”

Malone and, it seems, the rest of the cast are still wrapping their heads around just how massive the musical has become, especially after Malone’s Tony win. But it continues to steal hearts and grow its fan base night after night. Cumming sees why the show has done so well.

“One of the strongest bits about the show is that it’s a story about five people convincing 100,000 German troops of something that isn’t real,” Cumming says. “We play the same game as five actors onstage, tricking 800 people a night into believing something enough that isn’t real, but it moves them in a certain way.”

Operation Mincemeat cast members perform onstage.Julieta Cervantes

This article is part of Out's Sept/Oct 2025 issue, which hits newsstands August 26. Support queer media and subscribe — or download the issue through Apple News, Zinio, Nook, or PressReader starting August 14.