The West End company of Operation Mincemeat used its curtain call to reveal the show's next destination: the Comedy Theatre in Melbourne, where an Australian production opens in September 2027.
Operation Mincemeat will have its Australian premiere at the Comedy Theatre in Melbourne in September 2027, as the opening stop of an Australian leg of its world tour. It will be the fifth production of the musical, and the first to play outside the UK and North America. Further Australian cities are still to be announced, and the search for a cast begins in early 2027.
The news was delivered on 7 October from four stages, each by the actor currently playing Ewen Montagu: Madeleine Jackson-Smith in the West End at the Fortune Theatre, Holly Sumpton with the UK tour in Norwich, Julia Knitel on Broadway and Katie Kleiger with the North American tour in Chicago.
The Australian staging comes from Avalon, the British producer behind the London and New York runs. 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."
Melbourne is the latest in a quick succession of announcements. The Broadway production at the Golden Theatre was extended for an eleventh time earlier this week and now runs to 25 April 2027, while the UK tour has already been extended into 2027. The North American leg began on 20 September with two performances at the Providence Performing Arts Center in Rhode Island, seen by 5,200 people between them, the biggest audience the show has had. On 26 September the four companies played to 9,734 people in a single day. Once Australia is under way, the tour is due to continue to New Zealand, China and Mexico, taking the show to four continents.
It is a long way from the 77-seat New Diorama Theatre, where the show opened in 2019. Since then it has gathered 68 award nominations and 24 wins, including Best Musical four times, at the Olivier Awards, the WhatsOnStage Awards, the BroadwayWorld Theater Fans' Choice Awards and the Off-West End Awards. Broadway added four Tony nominations in 2025, Best Musical among them, and a Tony for Jak Malone as Best Featured Actor in a Musical for Hester Leggatt, a role that had already won Malone the Olivier in the same category.
The musical is written by SpitLip, the triple Tony-nominated team of David Cumming, Felix Hagan, Natasha Hodgson and Zoë Roberts, and directed by Robert Hastie. Its subject is a real piece of 1943 wartime trickery, in which British intelligence used a stolen corpse and a set of forged papers to deceive the enemy, told as a mix of farce, thriller and spy story in which Ian Fleming plays his part. Avalon produces in the West End and on Broadway in association with SpitLip; the piece was commissioned by New Diorama Theatre and co-commissioned by The Lowry, with support from the Rhinebeck Writers Retreat.
In London, Operation Mincemeat is booking now at the Fortune Theatre.
