Operation Mincemeat's Natasha Hodgson, David Cumming, and Jak Malone Debrief on "Dear Bill"

Operation Mincemeat is a musical as clever and ambitious as the real-life World War II mission that inspired it—a British ruse to fool the Nazis with fake invasion plans planted on a dead body. But near the end of Act 1, the fast-paced, madcap comedy slows down for a moment.

The song “Dear Bill,” performed by actor Jak Malone as the buttoned-up secretary Hester Leggett, begins as the team tries to concoct a final piece of their plan, a letter from the dead man’s fiancée. As Hester dictates the letter, however, it becomes clear she’s using the opportunity to reflect on something deeper and much more personal. It’s a breathtaking moment that stunned audiences in London, where the musical began, and it has done so again on Broadway.

David Cumming and Natasha Hodgson—two of the four-person cadre (along with Zoë Roberts and Felix Hagan) of Mincemeat writer-composers collectively known as SpitLip—remember encountering the real-life letter in Ben McIntyre’s book about the spy operation. “Dear Bill,” which comes after the upbeat, humorous “Making a Man,” allowed them to show the life-and-death stakes behind the musical’s humor. “We were writing a comedy musical,” said Cumming, “but it’s about war, and there was a hell of a lot of loss in that time period. You can’t be completely flippant about those things. It was by design that this would be a surprising moment.”

SpitLip writes all their work together, but one of Cumming’s early tasks was to take a first crack at the song. “I was sitting looking out on my garden and thinking, what would you write if you had to write a letter?” he recalled. A neighbor’s dog used to jump across the fence and dig in the roses, and that became an entry point—you’d write about the mundane, everyday happenings that still somehow continue despite larger turmoil in someone’s life and the world. So the dog and the roses made it into the lyrics, as did the “Why did we meet in the middle of a war?” line, which comes from the actual letter. “There’s so much emotion in such a throwaway line, and that came from Hester herself,” he said.

Hodgson added, “I think we were so blown away by the sincerity of those lines in the actual letter, that it made us feel like we could be brave enough to put our own selves and our stories into it. Because it felt like those lines are so true that this song deserves truth.”

And so their personal experiences also made their way into “Dear Bill”: a long-distance relationship for Cumming, and the death of Hodgson’s close friend. “This is the one song that we poured a lot of ourselves and our own emotions into,” said Hodgson. “What we tried to put into ‘Dear Bill’ is that feeling of having normality exist alongside the biggest, giant tombs of emotion that you can feel.” 

The song is about grief, but they were careful not to weigh it down with too many sad lyrics—because that’s not what you’d put down in a letter. “People navigate their sadness by trying not to hit the point that gives them pain,” Hodgson said, “and I was so overjoyed and overwhelmed by how much people really saw that [in this song]. I don’t think we realized just how universal that experience is.”

Malone, who won an Olivier Award in 2024 for portraying Hester and his other Mincemeat roles, first heard “Dear Bill” before the team decided which of the five-actor ensemble (Malone, Cumming, Hodgson, Roberts, and Claire-Marie Hall) would be playing which characters. He’d been sent the song as a demo and was asked to sing it at an early rehearsal.

“I was struck by how perfectly it encapsulated the tininess of grief, the little stabs that you get 20 times a day when you go, ‘Oh god, I can’t tell that person that,’” he said. “And I was also daunted by performing it, because of the layers of the thing—they’re doing a military mission, and this is all fake, then she’s writing a letter to a soldier currently serving overseas, but Hester is using her own memories to inform that. So she’s writing what she would have written during World War I, and then the further down the rabbit hole she gets, she’s taking this opportunity quickly, while she’s got it in front of her, to say the things that she wishes she could say now.”

During the show, it’s one of the few moments Malone gets to truly anticipate, because he’s off-stage briefly and gets a moment to himself. This is his chance to reset and bring the performance inward while also silently signaling that the audience should brace for impact.

“When Colonel Bevan [played by Roberts] says, ‘He needs to be carrying a letter. Soldiers don’t go off to war without a reminder of why they’re fighting in the first place,’ Hester does a little nod. And I’m thinking to myself, ‘You guys don’t even know what this woman is capable of, and you’re about to find out.’”

Each night, Malone feels the emotion that pours out of Hester. “When I finish the song, I have to really release this tension in my body,” he explained. “It’s not an intentional thing, it’s just my body not knowing the difference. It’s me saying difficult things and thinking about difficult things, and my body going, this is so uncomfortable. So yeah, I put myself through hell for that song.” 

The Mincemeat cast feels audiences’ responses to the song’s themes of love and loss—and to Malone’s performance—every time. In London, when Hester trails off at the end of “Dear Bill,” there was a hesitance before audiences would begin to clap. “It would take a while, and it would always be a moment of hush,” Malone said. In New York, however, the song has a different effect. “In America, where audiences are a little bit more vocal, everybody just lets out a little sigh, a little wow, a little exclamation, privately to themselves.” And from the Golden Theatre’s stage, the cast hears those hundreds of sighs all at once. 

“I’m like, ‘Oh, hello everyone. You’re out there,’” Malone shared. “To me, it’s the secret button on the number that we’ve never had before. They sort of breathe the final note of the song. It’s really, really lovely.” A fitting way to sign, seal, and deliver a letter this powerful.