We’re going to try and see one of the two in a few months. I’m leaning towards Mincemeat having seen the TV show of Schmigadoon!
Mincemeat is London Play, now on Broadway and involves the True Story of an operation to trick the Nazis. Bonus Ian Fleming was part of the trickster brigade.
Both musicals have more traditional Broadway music than something like Hamilton, more power to all that love it, but sitting through Hamilton would be torture for me.
Tickets are roughly the same cost it looks like. So I’m hoping that some input from people that actually saw them.
Last year we saw Hadestown in London. Renewed my interest in Broadway shows.
I don’t know if it would help decide, but there was a straight (non-musical) film about Operation Mincemeat a couple of years ago. I think it’s available on Netflix. Also, though you mentioned that you didn’t think you’d like Hamilton, a low-cost way to watch the stage musical is via Disney Plus or Hulu, where a film of the stage musical starring the original cast is available. I’m not big on rap/hip-hop (though not all of the songs are that) but it’s very well done. The costumes and stagecraft are impressive to watch. (For example, they use a turntable on stage quite effectively and the choreography of this is impressive.)
Also not particularly helpful, but I read the bookOperation Mincemeat back around the time it came out. Fascinating operation, but nothing I would have ever expected to be turned into a musical comedy.
A friend recommended Operation Mincemeat to me recently and now I am absolutely obsessed with it. It’s hilarious and I think the logistics and choreography of how they handle everything with only 5 actors, continually cross-casting, is really quite phenomenal. At the end of Act I, for instance, there’s a song where they cut instantaneously between the same actors playing a party scene and a tense underwater sub scene using lighting and minimal costume-change (hats) and it is really really cool. And it’s doing some interesting things with gender-casting (e.g., the main character, Ewen Montagu, is played by a woman) though I also like that they never really call attention to it, it’s just a thing that’s there. And in between all the comedy there are a couple of legitimately moving scenes. I love it so SO much and it’s now one of my absolute favorite musicals ever. (Also the Ian Fleming jokes are hilarious.)
That being said… I actually do think the music is less of what I think of of traditional Broadway than Schmigadoon probably is (though I haven’t seen Schmigadoon, I’ve seen clips of the TV show). It’s a bit of a more “pop” style and there are quite a lot of “spoken-to-music” lines (think Prof. Higgins in My Fair Lady) and one of the characters (Col. Bevan) does rap his lines, though to be fair he doesn’t actually have that many. It does strike me as influenced by Hamilton though not completely similar to it.
Honestly, if I were you I’d listen to the soundtrack, at least a couple of songs, to get a sense of the music. (It’s easily available on Youtube and Spotify.) If you like the songs, and the description above sounds intriguing, I am pretty confident you would like the musical as a whole. (This is how I got hooked, in fact!) However, I do know there are people who don’t really like that style and also who aren’t particularly taken by its scrappy nature (it pretty clearly began life as a budget musical and it’s not the sort that has a big chorus and a big expensive set, as you can probably figure out by my above description), so, you know, mileage varies.
Thank you, just what I was looking forward. I have surveyed some of the music and it is fine for me. Not what I would likely play on a drive in the car, but pretty much what I expect from a Musical.
I was already leaning towards Op Mincemeat and I think I’ll go that way.
Schmigadoon starts previews April 4 so no one’s seen that yet.
I’ve seen Operation Mincemeat twice and I loved everything about it. What the cast pulls off in terms of physical comedy and doubling characters is mind-blowing. The music is also so catchy and really clever. They do sing very fast in some songs, and with strong accents so some people have said they had trouble deciphering the lyrics but I didn’t find that to be difficult at all. The Act 2 opening number is just chef’s kiss brilliant.
Ahhhhh another fan!! I love this musical so much. I do admit I had some trouble deciphering the faster lyrics, and occasionally they use British slang I didn’t actually know (like “you didn’t bottle it, did you?” which I wasn’t even sure I’d heard correctly at the time).
But I mean… I have trouble deciphering fast lyrics in general (even though I adore fast lyrics; I love both the Hamilton fast raps and Gilbert&Sullivan patter songs), it doesn’t matter if it’s accented or not, so I’m used to it, ha. And I didn’t feel like it detracted from my experience. (I did make sure to listen to the soundtrack a lot beforehand, because I know this is a problem I have.)
I agree that it’s so clever. I love how they put the songs together e.g. in “Just for Tonight,” which I think is a tour-de-force both musically and staging-wise.