Early on the morning of April 30, 1943, a floating body was discovered off the southern coast of Spain. Retrieved by a fisherman, it was brought to the city of Huelva and identified as Captain William Martin, of the British Royal Marines. A briefcase chained to the corpse contained documents indicating that the Allies planned to advance on Greece and Sardinia—intel that the Nazi-sympathizing Spanish authorities passed on to the Germans. Surprise, Nazis! It was all a British-intelligence ruse, known as Operation Mincemeat. Back in London, operatives had obtained the cadaver of a homeless man who’d died from eating rat poison, concocted a fake identity for him, lined his body with phony love letters from a made-up fiancée (plus a receipt for a diamond engagement ring), and dumped him from a submarine. The aim was to distract the Axis forces from a planned invasion of Sicily, which the Allies handily took that summer. A message sent to Winston Churchill gloated, “Mincemeat swallowed rod, line and sinker.”

This unlikely tale has been told and retold, including, a few years back, in a handsome period film starring Colin Firth. But New York audiences can now see it reimagined as a rollicking musical farce, complete with silly mustaches, in the Broadway show “Operation Mincemeat,” which opens this week, at the Golden. The production originated in 2019, at an eighty-one-seat theatre in London, and became a West End hit. The cast of five, all thirtysomething goofballs, play close to ninety characters (they’ve lost count), among them Ian Fleming, who worked in the department of naval intelligence, pre-James Bond, and may have come up with the scheme.

“We were very enamored with the idea of winning wars using cleverness,” Natasha Hodgson, one of the actor-writers, said last week. “For a bunch of nerds, it’s nice to know that you can make a difference without using violence.” The troupe could relate; like the spooks they play, they were used to being scrappy and inventive. “Our style of theatre-making was born out of necessity, out of having no money,” one of her collaborators, Zoë Roberts, explained. “In a similar way, the desperation of the situation birthed huge creativity.” Three of the actors—Hodgson, Roberts, and David Cumming—wrote the show with Felix Hagan, with whom they formed the theatre company SpitLip, and they perform it with Jak Malone and Claire-Marie Hall. The trio met at the University of Warwick; their previous shows include a werewolf murder mystery and a horror-comedy about a tentacled beast devouring a residential complex (it was a metaphor for the housing crisis). “Critical successes, commercial failures,” Cumming said.

They had been looking for a real-life story to spin into a musical when Hodgson was on a family holiday in Norway and her brother urged her to listen to a podcast about Operation Mincemeat. “I couldn’t get it to these guys fast enough,” she recalled. “And we were, like, World War Two? Absolutely not,” Cumming added. “The grayest, most boring time on earth. She’s been kidnapped by a yeti! It’s a cry for help!” But they quickly realized the story’s potential, both for pathos and for tomfoolery. While in previews on Broadway, they were still making changes, in part to clarify things for American audiences. (There’s now an announcement up top that it’s a true story.) “Mustaches are still going in,” Hodgson said.

The quintet was mostly new to New York, and Malone had been cataloguing his city eats on Instagram: pizza from Joe’s, banana pudding from Magnolia Bakery. That morning, before a rehearsal, the actors took a field trip to Spyscape, an espionage museum on Eighth Avenue, featuring interactive challenges and developed with help from a former M.I.6 trainer. (It’s popular for corporate team building.) “This is so up our street,” Hodgson said, as they put on green wristbands. They chose spy names—CrystalShroud, EnigmaStrand—from mounted iPads while a voice announced, “Welcome to Spygames, where wellness and fun meet.” (“They get you a green tea at the end?” Malone wondered.) Then they entered Zone 04, a small gray room, for their first challenge: Code Shield. Basically, you punch glowy dots on the walls as suspenseful music blares. “It’s like playing whack-a-mole,” Cumming said.

In Zone 08, they tried a code-breaking game called Cipher Sequence, involving colored lights on the floor—and flunked. More exciting was Zone 09, in which they had to dart through a room of lasers. Vaulting and wriggling, they were reduced to shrieks. “I’m never going to rob a bank,” Malone said, panting. “Lasers did not help my wellness.”

“If I pull something and can’t do the show tonight, that’s not my fault,” Roberts warned.

After trying Cipher Sequence again, with little improvement, Hodgson said, “Let’s end on a low.” They exited through the gift shop, where they found a game called Danger in the Deep, an escape room set on a submarine. “We can dress up as characters!” Hall said.

Roberts countered,“We’re doing that every night of our lives.” ♦