Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart, live from the WNYC Studios in Soho. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. I'm really grateful that you are here. On today's show, we'll continue our full bio conversation with Susan Morrison, the author of Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live, we'll speak with Eamon Dolan, the author of The Power of Parting, and we'll hear from the Chicago hip-hop artist Saba, whose latest album has just come out. That is the plan. Let's get this started with Operation Mincemeat.

[music]

The Olivier-winning musical Operation Mincemeat is based on a very real covert mission. In the midst of World War II, a group of British MI5 agents concocted a plan to trick Nazi forces. The Germans thought the Allies were invading Sardinia when they really planned to invade Sicily. Rather than have me explain the mission, let's listen to the cast sing about it. This is the pitch from Operation Mincemeat.

[MUSIC - Operation Mincemeat: The Pitch]

Natasha Hodgson stars as Ewen Montagu, a bit of a blowhard, desperate for a moment of glory. He teams up with a timid man named Charles, who is really the brains behind this operation. He's played by David Cumming and there are many other characters. So many in fact, that Zoe Roberts plays more than 20 different people. Operation Mincemeat spent years playing in small British theaters before taking the West End by storm. Now the comedy has crossed the pond and landed on Broadway. To much acclaim, the Observer called it "Totally lovable and expertly zany."

Zoe Roberts, Natasha Hodgson, and David Cumming are all members of the comedy group SpitLip. They co-wrote and star in Operation Mincemeat, which is running at the Golden Theatre through February 15th, 2026. They join me now in-studio. It is so great to have you here.

Zoe Roberts: Hi.

Natasha Hodgson: Hi.

David Cumming: Thank you for having us.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk about the group. I said it right. Spit--

David Cumming: You did.

Natasha Hodgson: You smashed it.

Alison Stewart: Practice that one. Natasha, how did you meet?

Natasha Hodgson: The three of us met at university. We met at the University of Warwick when we had little tiny babies. We just really bonded and clicked over watching British comedy together, lots of films together. And we. We loved making weird stories. We formed a theater company out of university where we went to the Edinburgh Fringe a bunch of times with loads of comedies. We just kept shows together that were critically acclaimed and commercial. Absolute failures, no money whatsoever.

Then one day we thought to ourselves, "God, if we're ever going to make this, we really got to put all our eggs in a basket." We decided to try and write a full musical together with another guy, Felix Hagan, who's the fourth member of SpitLip and Operation Mincemeat was the result of that experiment.

Alison Stewart: Zoe, how did you know that you had a similar sensibility? Do you remember a moment?

Zoe Roberts: I wish I was young enough that it was so recent to remember a moment. I think we were writing a bunch of stuff together and writing sketches and characters. I think an early show I wrote at university, writing and going, "I know Dave can do this part and will be hilarious. I'm going to write these stupid things because I know he's going to say them and make them even more stupid." "Oh, Tash actually is going to do this role brilliantly.

Natasha Hodgson: Because she's so beautiful, yes.

Zoe Roberts: -because she's so stupid."

Natasha Hodgson: Okay, well different words, different [crosstalk], that's fine.

David Cumming: She looks like a lady.

Zoe Roberts: I think it means that we discovered the joy of writing for each other really early on, and knowing that what your friends are going to bring to the table in terms of delivery is going to amp up what you're writing is really special.

Alison Stewart: What's changed since you started? You started in 2017, it's 2025. What's changed about SpitLip?

David Cumming: I think we're probably slightly better at writing musicals than when we started writing this one. We are definitely faster, knowing when things are right and responding to an audience. It has taken, legit, seven years to get it to be this final product that's currently on Broadway, where I think we'd probably agree it's probably at its strongest form because we've had enough tries at it now.

It's a hard thing to make a musical regardless of what kind of music it is, but particularly musical comedy, because the marrying of the rhythm of the comedy with the rhythm of the music and the ebb and flow of emotions. It's a really complex puzzle. Once you change one bit, suddenly many bits around it no longer make sense. Every tweak you make, there's another 10 more tweaks that then have to be done, so it takes a while.

Our sensibilities as writers have got more honed and more refined, and I think we're braver with emotions. I think we were younger and we were purely just writing comedy initially. This story has led us to add in much more emotional heft to the story because the story asks for that. I think we're probably braver, actually, now.

Alison Stewart: Zoe, let's talk about Operation Mincemeat. It's received a very serious treatment in a film with Colin Firth and in a history book. When you first heard about it, what struck you as funny?

Zoe Roberts: It's so funny we get that question because, to us, it leaped off the page. In all of our research and in the podcasts we listen to about it, it leaped forward as a comedy. It's almost like a gang comedy. It's part Heist. It's sort of Ocean's Eleven with spies in the war. It's. It's a group of people going to insane lengths to achieve this kind of amazing thing. If anything, we've had to kind of pare down the insanity that is within the true story, because A, people just didn't believe us and they thought we were making it up, and B, we just didn't have room for it. The more you write, the more you realize actually what we need space for is for people to connect with these characters and care about what's happening. If you're spending 10 minutes on a zany race car driver who was partially blind, who insisted on driving up to Scotland and almost crashing into a synagogue on the way.

Natasha Hodgson: All true.

Alison Stewart: This is all true.

Zoe Roberts: That was all true.

Natasha Hodgson: Or the war magician who tried to get his angle in, Jasper Maskelyne, who believed he could trick the Germans with inflatable tanks. We had him in. We had to cut him.

Zoe Roberts: You have to start editing yourself. We found out that the movie was happening, I think the day of our first performance back in 2019, it got released.

Natasha Hodgson: [unintelligible 00:07:00] [crosstalk] day.

David Cumming: There was a lot going on.

Zoe Roberts: It was like a press release. It was like,

Natasha Hodgson: John Madden has taken the rights to Operation [crosstalk] like, "Oh, my God." Any day before opening, you're in hell anyway, and being like, "Okay, guys, don't worry. Just remember the lines and try and do the songs. By the way, it's going to be a movie."

Zoe Roberts: I think what's lovely is that all of the treatments of the story are so different that it feels like a completely different retelling. It feels like you can enjoy both of them in very different ways.

Alison Stewart: What was the research process like, David?

David Cumming: Scattergun. We found it initially via a podcast, the Stuff You Should Know podcast, which Tasha's brother passed on to her, saying, "I've got this. I've found something that should be musical."

Natasha Hodgson: Little brothers.

David Cumming: Yes, little brothers.

Natasha Hodgson: Little brothers.

David Cumming: What are they good for? It turns out, musicals.

Natasha Hodgson: Unfortunately, yes, he was right.

David Cumming: We listened to that, and then we read Montagu's own book and then watched his own film that he put himself in.

Natasha Hodgson: He's a great guy.

David Cumming: Yes. What a guy. Then read every book we could possibly find, every bit of research on the internet. Anytime something jumped out as we could see it theatrically, we just put a pin in it and go, "Right, if we were to stage this moment, how would we do that? How do we boil it down to its essence? What would be the hook in the song? What would be the two lines that would be the refrain." Then we'd all take it away and go from there.

We actually probably did eventually probably far too much research because it's such a big topic. I think that then allowed us to know which bits of the story to pull on. It's very important to us that we don't misrepresent these people or that we don't lie and don't change what happened. Ultimately, you also have to respect the dramatic arc of a piece of theater and that you need to massage things so that the audience feel them correctly at the right time, but without lying. That was quite a difficult process with this story, I think.

Alison Stewart: Yes. Tash, I was going to ask about that. The idea of being committed to detail, but also having to fulfill the goal of a musical.

Natasha Hodgson: Rhe process, I think, from the first show in 2019 to where it is now, that's been the biggest challenge for us. Making sure that the dramatic arc of the show, but also the arc of all the characters. We have five characters at the center of the story, all of whom we really care about and want the audience to invest in. How do we make sure that we spend enough time with each of them that their stories are satisfying whilst making sure that we don't tip into total fantasy.

I think the greatest thing about theater is that it's such a, for us, romantic and exciting medium in that you can have girls play boys and boys play girls. I think with the story of it all, taking a certain liberty here and there, I think the audience come out going, "Wow, that was an amazing take." A lot of people go, "I really want to know now which bits were completely true and which bits were--"

I think what's great is all the craziest stuff in the show is the stuff that's real, because we would never want to make up anything crazy that happened because we can't do that. We can't do the story. At this point when American pilot crashes into Spain with the same name as the guy with the corpse who they want to use at the same time, the whole [unintelligible 00:10:15] mission goes, "What? Who's this guy now?" The audience kind of go, "Oh, that's fun that they've made that up." But actually, no, it's a crucial [crsstalk] point.

David Cumming: You literally have the line, you couldn't write it.

Natasha Hodgson: You couldn't write it because-- Yes. It was these points in the research that every new thing we found out, we were just like, "This is absolutely mad." It was just such an exciting story to uncover and follow that we just couldn't wait to put it on a stage so the audience could follow it with us.

Natasha Hodgson: My guests are David Cumming, Natasha Hodgson, and Zoe Roberts. They are the stars and the co-writers of the new Broadway musical Operation Mincemeat. It's about a covert British intelligence mission carried out during World War II. As you can understand, it was zany. It's running now at the Golden Theatre. You mentioned, Tasha, about boys playing girls, girls playing boys. David, why was that a decision that you decided to make?

David Cumming: Since we started making work, we've always cast a show just based on whoever's funniest for the part or whoever we think, as writers, can do the best voice or has the funniest face. Genuinely, just whatever we think would be the funniest. We've just inherited that as part of our practice. Also, for monetary reasons, we could barely afford to pay ourselves, let alone employ an entire new cast of people,-

Zoe Roberts: Got our theater.

David Cumming: -so if we put ourselves in the show, then we only have to pay two extra people. That helped.

Alison Stewart: Makes sense.

David Cumming: Then, once we started doing this specific story in that way, it became very clear to us of the importance of presenting the story in that manner, in a story which is full of a rich, entitled, privileged white men, having a number of those characters played by women who are taking up space, who are acting like men. The meat and veg of the show on the actual paper of the script, there's nothing queer about the show in that sense. Actually presenting the show in the way that we do, raises these more modern questions around gender identity and how people get to be in the world, how they get to move around the world, and who we allow to say things, who we don't allow to say things in a way that I think audiences, it kind of washes over them, and they take away from it. After the show, they start thinking about those topics, I think.

We've had people come forward saying, "My elderly parents, a week after the show, suddenly turned around and were like, 'I've been thinking a lot about how in that show, that woman was just allowed to walk around and act like a man.'"

Natasha Hodgson: And you didn't notice it.

David Cumming: "Didn't notice it. Actually, maybe women should be allowed to do it." Just bringing these questions up in an interesting way was never our intention, but quickly became obvious to us that it was an important part of what audiences were taking away.

Zoe Roberts: I think also what's nice about it is that it lets people come to it versus trying to feel like we're trying to attack them with difficult or spiky gender issues. I think, particularly for certain members of an older generation can be quite a difficult or strange thing to try and get your head around. Whereas if it's just like your daughter being like, "We're going to go see a play about World War II," the dads are like, "Yes, please. World War II, that's what we like." Then we get to surreptitiously feed them a bit of gender policy in with the mix.

Alison Stewart: Yes. Zoe, we talked about it, the 1940s gender issue comes up in a lot of ways because the women are treated as sort of like, "Oh, go get the tea," occasionally. Why did you want to explore that gender dynamic in that period of British history?

Zoe Roberts: I think that actually sprung from the mostly absence of women in a lot of the research we did. We were putting together this core group that were involved. There were these women that would occasionally crop up in the retelling, Hester Leggett and Jean Leslie, who were pretty integral to the mission, but they would disappear from the narrative. We would go, "Oh, well, what happened to them after the mission?" or, "What were they doing at this point?" They just weren't present. It was a real stark reminder that these narratives are largely told by men who have that kind of power. A small microcosm of history as told by the victors, which is also a big thing we touch on.

It meant that we really wanted to do justice to these women. Actually, their narratives are probably the part of the show that we had to work quite hard to craft. It took a long time for us to figure out those journeys. We have a woman in the older generation who is kind of slightly more resigned to the fact that her place in the workplace is quite limited. You can get stuff done, but you have to do it in a certain way and without pushing these boundaries. Then we have Jean, played, amazingly, by Claire-Marie Hall, who is of the younger generation. She's coming in and she's seeing this as an opportunity, as an opportunity to get involved and to make a difference and to change stuff. I think that really spoke to us as something that we wanted to give it space and time on that stage. Those two women learning from each other and figuring out that there are different ways to make a difference has become a real important throughline to the show, I think.

Natasha Hodgson: I think as well, what we didn't want to do is end those stories with, "And don't worry, young Jean Leslie ended up running MI5," because it would be an insult to the women who were lost to these histories because the reasons that they didn't get to these parts is not because they weren't capable, it's because at every level, there was somebody above them, a man, saying, "You should know your place."

You spoke to that moment, which is, of course, yes, there's a point in the show where Jean Leslie is taken off mission, purely because really, she annoys the older man. It's a really crucial moment for us that we wanted to put in because we didn't want to patronize anyone or claim that that wasn't the case. These women, they get to get so far, but ultimately, in these structures as they stand, you cannot get any further than how the gatekeeper allows you to. It felt important to have that simmering along alongside with the fun joy of it, which is the most important thing.

David Cumming: Particularly that time period, the '40s, because all the men did go away to war, it was such a huge drive forward in British feminism. I imagine it was the same in America. Then the '50s was the backlash of that, is that all the men came back, and it was like back to the home. Then the sexual revolution of the '60s was the answer to that. The '60s would never have happened had the '40s not have happened of the women getting out in the workplace. That energy of Jean then being quashed represents that history of what happened to women's rights.

Natasha Hodgson: We're inspired by the accounts of the women like the Wrens who got to fly aircrafts that they never would have been trained on because they needed women to come and be in the forces. These women look back on their lives and they were like, "It was just the most exciting time and so amazing. Yes, we were in a war, but my God, we were given responsibility and we stretched ourselves and we showed what we could do." It was just that thing of both that being so amazing, but also heart-wrenching of being you had this moment, and then the men came back and took it off you. I think that part of our story is putting our anger at that into the story that we wanted to tell.

Alison Stewart: I want to play a clip from Operation Mincemeat. This is all the ladies and we can talk about it on the other side.

[MUSIC - Operation Mincemeat: All the Ladies]

Alison Stewart: That's from Operation Mincemeat. "All the Ladies," sounds a little bit like, "Single Ladies." A little [unintelligible 00:18:16] in there. Throughout the entire musical, we get different genres of music. We won't even talk about the [unintelligible 00:18:23].

Natasha Hodgson: Keep the secrets.

Alison Stewart: Keep the secret. What was the inspiration for the way the music evolved? You want to take it, David?

David Cumming: Yes. It was very important to us early on that if we were going to be making a musical about World War II, that it had to not in any way feel old or like it was--

Alison Stewart: Andrews Sisters, yes?

David Cumming: Yes, exactly. The look of the show has never been particularly fully rooted in reality of 1943. The set's very bright. It was very important to us musically that the music wasn't just jazz music from the '40s. Every song, we gave ourselves freedom to be whatever is the right vibe for every moment in the show, that's the style of music we're going to go for. All the Ladies comes at a point where you meet Jean for the first time. As we've said, she's this young character who is part of the new wave of women who are like, "Hey, we're in the workplace. I'm not going to do what men tell me anymore."

This is really exciting. It's the first time you get a much more modern sound in the sonic palette. It's a classic girl-pop track. We lean into that heavily. All of us dress up as women and become the backing dancers. It's a real surprising moment of the show because all you've watched is just a bunch of men in offices up until that point, and suddenly go to the secretary pool and it's this big girl group number. Claire-Marie just hitting all these high notes and riffing. We do, in fact, do a tiny bit of the Single Ladies dance as part of it as a homage. It's one of the fun moments of the show.

Then there's a few other moments where we zoom into super modern, modern sounds, which we won't talk about. That's to represent the modern ideology of the time. The other politics that were happening around the time of the '40s, this new ideology coming forward. We're like, "Well, that should be represented by the most modern sound we can find," which would be modern pop, basically.

Alison Stewart: We're discussing Operation Mincemeat. We'll be back after a quick break.

[music]

This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guests in-studio are David Cumming, Natasha Hodgson, and Zoe Roberts. They are the stars and the co-writers of the new Broadway musical Operation Mincemeat. It's running now at the Golden Theatre. All right, Natasha, you play Ewan Montagu.

Natasha Hodgson: I do.

Alison Stewart: What three adjectives would you use to describe Ewan?

Natasha Hodgson: Oh, my favorite man. I'd probably use boisterous, impatient, curious. I think that's probably a generous one. I play the guy every night, so I have to. I think what's really great about him as a character is that he's a very much a kick-the-door-down, "You will listen to me. My ideas are good." He's the kind of person who drags anyone in his orbit along with that. I feel like he's a person who gives confidence to those who are in his golden glow. Those people include Charles Cholmondeley and the Jean Leslie who we were talking about earlier, the younger female character. When he spots Jean Leslie, he genuinely believes this is a person who is brilliant, who should be in this with us.

The problem with those types of people, those golden glow people, is that the second they decide to turn their golden glow off, you're left out in the dark. That's the more darker side of him as a character. I think of all those types of fascinating people, the Billy Flynns, the Danny Oceans, they can get you along with a scheme, but they can cut you out of it just as quickly. They fascinate us and they horrify us. It's not a for me to play that darned man every night.

Alison Stewart: David., Charlie starts out unsure of himself. He grows into himself a little bit. How did you want to shape his arc?

David Cumming: Him and Ewan are the two sides of a coin, basically. They have what each other don't have. Cholmondeley has all the brains, the hard work, and the rigor of his ideas, but none of the confidence to get them pushed through. That is what Ewan has. Ewan doesn't do enough work, but he certainly can--

Natasha Hodgson: He gets it done. What do you want?

David Cumming: From all accounts, actually, the real-life Charles Cholmondeley, this process of doing this mission and it succeeding, made him into the man he then later went on to become. He actually disappears from the story because, unlike Ewan Montagu, he was quite serious about being an MI5 agent. When he kind of disappears from the story, the last thing you hear is he goes off to hunt locusts in the Middle East after the war. That's the last thing you know. "Sure. As if you're doing that." You're in the Middle East post-war, I'm sure you're hunting locusts.

Alison Stewart: Hunting locusts.

Natasha Hodgson: Of course you are.

David Cumming: Of course you are. You're definitely not working with the British government yet. The arc needed to be that he doesn't have the thing inside of him. He is different inside than he is outside. He sings a song called Dead in the Water, where he talks about he wishes he was a maggot, because at least a maggot then knows it's going to become a fly, and it becomes a fly, and it can do the thing it's meant to do. He doesn't have it in him to express his inner world outwardly. Yet, across the show, he then finds his own two feet, learns from Jean, learns from Montagu, learns from the whole process, that the things that matter aren't being praised for your ideas, it's the change that you make. That's why you do it. He sees all these other men at the beginning of the show and wants to be one of them. Actually, he grows beyond them to say what you're looking for isn't correct. What I'm trying to do here is something a bit-

Natasha Hodgson: More meaningful.

David Cumming: -more meaningful. Thank you.

Alison Stewart: You play many roles, but we'll concentrate on Johnny Bevan, the officer in charge of Charles and Montagu. He has to approve the mission and he's under a lot of pressure.

Zoe Roberts: Yes. He's not always having the most fun time in the show. He's basically sort of trying to wrangle this group of absolutely chaotic idiots who are having the best time of their lives. I think it's important that he's there. I think in a lot of shows he would be an antagonist. It was really important to us that he's not the antagonist. He's not this authority figure who is-- I mean, yes, he's not ruining everybody's fun. He's coming through with the weight and the responsibility of actually what's at stake. That is really, really important. If he wasn't there kind of trying to push all of this through, nothing would get done. Him and Montagu are particularly at odds with each other because there is that sort of--

Natasha Hodgson: I call it a bromance, but call it what you want though. It's simmering away.

Zoe Roberts: You're only hurting my feelings here, but that's fine.

Natasha Hodgson: I think it is. It's because that blasting through on charm and a hope and a wing and a prayer, sometimes Bevan has to take those risks but he doesn't like that it is on such a knife-edge. He sees the bigger picture. As soon as he goes off stage from the scene you're watching, he's going into 1,000 different meetings and authorizing 1,000 different plans.

Zoe Roberts: He was also the only guy who wasn't from the poshest of the posh, wasn't he, [crosstalk]?

Natasha Hodgson: Yes. I think he sees that level of privilege for what it is and wants to check that instinct.

David Cumming: He doesn't have quite the devil-may-care attitude to the fact that these are real people's lives that you're playing with in a war. That weighs heavily on him, more so than anyone else.

Natasha Hodgson: Yes. He's very, very aware of what will happen if this doesn't come off, or I think worse, if they go for this and it fails, it will actually make the situation worse. It will actually expose the deception that the British were trying to do and actually make things 10 times worse in the war. He knows that he's kind of gambled on this team of people and doesn't necessarily know whether that was the right thing to do. That's that tension that he's living with throughout.

Alison Stewart: I want to play the clip of Dear Bill. Dear Bill is a song that is sung by Secretary Hester Leggett. She was a real person. She's singing about her own experience having a loved one in World War I. It's a love letter she's singing about. Let's listen to it and we can talk about it on the other side.

[MUSIC - Operation Mincemeat: Dear Bil]

Alison Stewart: People were crying in the audience during this moment in the show with all these wild and zany moments. Then there's this beautiful, soft moment in the middle of the show. How did you decide where you would put that song?

Zoe Roberts: That's such a good question.

Natasha Hodgson: That's a good question. I think what we knew was that we had this character, Hester Leggett. She was a mystery to us because we had such scant information in this book. What we knew about her was that she was nicknamed The Spin, the Spinster. She was known as the furious, scary woman of the office. That was one fact we knew. We also knew that she was the one who'd written a love letter for this fake corpse's fiancé that was filled with this really tender, youthful energy. It had the line in it that we read together, "Why did we go in the middle of a war? What a silly thing for anyone to do."

We read that together and we thought, "My God, these two facts, how can they sit together?" That was where the song was born of this. We wanted to interrupt this crazy adventure with this real moment of these older women during World War II who have already gone through so much loss and are having to do it a second time. It really struck us. We knew that we wanted a moment in the show of real peace, and also a real genuine, heartfelt emotion. We thought it was right that we gave it to this female character.

We feel like it hits all the more because it comes kind of out of nowhere. It comes out of this really crazy homage sequence called Making a Man, where the gang are gallivanting around the town having the time of their lives. Then we just wanted to kind of pull the rug and go, "Yes, they're having a lot of fun, but actually, beneath all of that, there's so much heartbreak and so much worry and stress for everyone else who's living through war."

Zoe Roberts: When she starts singing it, she doesn't know that she's about to open up and be that vulnerable. I think that's quite important for her as a character. She would never go into a conversation and go, "Well, let me tell you about all my feelings." She starts off just dictating a letter as it needs to be.

Natasha Hodgson: [unintelligible 00:29:04] [crosstalk] letter.

Zoe Roberts: It's a job. That's her entire life is, "Well, there's a job that needs doing. Okay, I'm going to do it." Then it drifts into more memory and somewhere a lot more vulnerable. You realize gradually that actually this was real and she's reliving some stuff. I think that's what makes it all the more potent. It catches the audience by surprise also because it catches her by surprise.

Alison Stewart: Last question. What is the difference between an American audience and a British audience? You've got a minute.

David Cumming: American audiences are definitely more vocal, just in general, which is really great for a comedy. Also, it seems that I think we've talked about this, I think maybe possibly because of the history of Vaudeville and like Laurel & Hardy, Buster Keaton,-

Zoe Roberts: Marx Brothers.

David Cumming: -Marx Brothers, you've got a national history of comedy, physical comedy. American audiences seem to get the game that we're playing much more quickly than they ever did in the UK, which is great.

Zoe Roberts: We're having a great time. Love it.

Alison Stewart: We have been talking about Operation Mincemeat. My guests were David Cumming, Natasha Hodgson, and Zoe Roberts. It's appearing now at the Golden Theatre. Go see it. Thanks for coming into the studio.