Operation Mincemeat will open at the Comedy Theatre in Melbourne in September 2027, the start of an Australian leg of its world tour and the fifth production of a musical already running on Broadway, in the West End and on tours of the UK and North America.
The announcement was made from four stages at once on October 7. At curtain call in New York, London, Chicago and Norwich, the four actors currently playing Ewen Montagu, Julia Knitel on Broadway, Madeleine Jackson-Smith in the West End, Holly Sumpton on the UK tour and Katie Kleiger on the North American tour, each told their audience that the show's next stop is Australia, where it will premiere at the Comedy Theatre in Melbourne in September 2027. Further Australian cities have yet to be named, and casting for the new company will begin in early 2027.
No dates, prices or on-sale details have been released. A waitlist for the Australian engagement is open on the production's official site, and the Australian company posts updates as @mincemeataus.
Jon Thoday, producer at Avalon, said: "It's incredibly exciting to be invited to produce Operation Mincemeat in Australia and to be able to bring the show to a whole new audience. From its beginnings in a 77-seat London fringe theatre, the show is now playing simultaneously in the West End and on Broadway, with a world tour underway, so far spanning the UK and North America. Australia will be the fifth production of Operation Mincemeat and the next chapter in its extraordinary journey."
The Melbourne date arrives with the New York run still lengthening. The Broadway production, which began performances at the Golden Theatre (252 West 45th Street) on February 15, 2025, was extended for an eleventh time only days ago and is now booking through April 25, 2027. The producers say more than 5,000 Broadway ticket buyers, roughly one in every 25, have come back for repeat visits, and 205 of them have bought seats for ten or more performances.
The touring arm is growing just as quickly. The North American leg opened on September 20 with two performances at the Providence Performing Arts Center in Rhode Island, playing to a combined 5,200 people, the largest audience the show had drawn. Six days later, on September 26, the Broadway, West End, UK touring and North American companies played to 9,734 people between them in a single day. The UK leg has been extended into 2027, and after Australia the world tour is due to move on to New Zealand, China and Mexico, which would put the show on four continents. In London it continues at the Fortune Theatre, where the West End production is booking.
The musical tells the true story of a 1943 British intelligence deception, in which a stolen corpse carrying forged papers was used to mislead the enemy, and plays it as farce, thriller and spy caper at once, with Ian Fleming himself given a hand in the plot. It was written by the triple Tony-nominated company SpitLip, made up of David Cumming, Felix Hagan, Natasha Hodgson and Zoë Roberts, and is directed by Robert Hastie.
Since its 2019 opening at the 77-seat New Diorama Theatre in London, the show has collected 68 award nominations and 24 wins, among them four Best Musical awards, from the Olivier Awards, the WhatsOnStage Awards, the BroadwayWorld Theater Fans' Choice Awards and the Off-West End Awards. On Broadway it earned four Tony nominations in 2025, including Best Musical, and Jak Malone won Best Featured Actor in a Musical as Hester Leggatt, a role that had already brought Malone the Olivier Award in the same category.
Avalon produces the show on Broadway and in the West End in association with SpitLip. It was commissioned by New Diorama Theatre and co-commissioned by The Lowry, with support from the Rhinebeck Writers Retreat.
