EXCLUSIVE: Producers of Operation Mincemeat are raising at least $11.5 million to transfer the critically acclaimed, Olivier Award-winning musical to Broadway, according to financial documents. People familiar with the show said the plan is to open at the Golden Theatre early next year as part of the current, 2024/25, season.
The Golden is home to Stereophonic — the Tony Award-winning play about a fractious rock band making an album– which recently “extended by popular demand for a final time” to Jan. 12, 2025.
Created by four writer-performers, three of whom met as students at the University of Warwick, Mincemeat is based on an absurd, real-life World War II British intelligence scheme: outfitting a corpse as a Royal Marine with phony documents to dupe the Nazis about an upcoming Allied invasion.
Notwithstanding industry concerns that the new musical may be “too British” to conquer Broadway, the comedy charmed some high-profile stateside reviewers. Peter Marks, formerly chief drama critic of the Washington Post, called it the funniest show in London. The New Yorker‘s Helen Shaw wrote that “Mincemeat presents itself as pure up-from-the-Fringe wackadoodle merriment…. with silliness and with lickety-split lyrics in a Lin-Manuel Miranda-esque mode…All the time, though, it’s moving its key emotional artillery into line.”
One need not work for MI5 to recognize the challenge of opening an unfamiliar title on Broadway without an initial, attention-getting run off-Broadway or at a nonprofit theater. While the 800-seat Golden Theatre is one of Broadway’s smaller houses, it has nearly twice the capacity of London’s Fortune Theatre, where Mincemeat opened in May 2023 after four years of development at tiny venues.
At the Olivier Awards, Mincemeat author and actor Zoë Roberts thanked “our army of supporters who got us all the way to the West End.”
To achieve just 75 percent of its gross potential at the Golden and recoup its $11.5 million minimum capitalization within a year, Mincemeat tickets must average about $146. (I calculated that from a Mincemeat recoupment chart for an unnamed theater with 802 seats, which is the capacity of the Golden.) Last week, only Hamilton, McNeal with Robert Downey Jr., Oh, Mary! and The Outsiders commanded a higher average price. (Cabaret did as well — until movie star Eddie Redmayne left the cast Sept. 14.)
Mincemeat will arrive after having set an unusual precedent. At the Fortune Theatre, every ticket for each performance is priced the same, from the equivalent of $53 on Mondays to $120 on weekends. The show has said it was produced for just $3 million in London.
Mincemeat producer Jon Thoday told The Stage that one-price-fits-all makes the best seats widely accessible, as long as theatergoers go early in the week. Thoday, whose company, Avalon, produces television and live comedy, criticized pricing “where you go and sit in the stalls and one seat is priced at X, and the other one next to it is priced at Y. I think that’s bollocks.”
No word on whether Thoday will pursue flat pricing at the Shubert-owned Golden.
With a maximum capitalization of $14.5 million, Mincemeat isn’t expensive by current Broadway standards. According to Securities and Exchange Commission filings for this season, Maybe Happy Ending is being capitalized for as much as $18.25 million, Buena Vista Social Club is at $17 million, Tammy Faye is $25 million, Swept Away is $14.5 million, and the not-yet-announced Just in Time, starring Jonathan Groff as Bobby Darin, is raising $12.5 million.
Stereophonic — which is the subject of a New Yorker story by Michael Schulman about similarities with a memoir by a Fleetwood Mac engineer — has been selling particularly well since it won five Tonys in June. A person familiar with the production said that by November, it’s expected to recoup its capitalization — $4.8 million, according to an SEC filing. That’s before accounting for New York’s theatrical production tax credit.
Should its strong sales continue, Stereophonic‘s Broadway profits could be sizable, an encouraging sign for unconventional commercial theater without stars.
