NEW YORK — Operation Mincemeat was not about baking tasty little seasonal pies but the name given to an elaborate 1943 ruse concocted by the British intelligence services to clear out thousands of Nazi soldiers from Sicily by making them think the Allied forces were headed to Sardinia instead.

Incredibly, it involved a British submarine planting a dead military body carrying fake invasion plans in the sea off the coast of Spain. Even more incredibly, it actually worked. The Nazis took the bait, hook, line and sinker, and skedaddled to Sardinia, smoothing the way for the Allies to take Sicily, a major turning point in World War II.

That story, arguably British intelligence’s finest hour, showed up in post-facto accounts, novels and movies as early as the 1950s, which happened to be when Ian Fleming’s James Bond first was shaking, maybe even stirring, U.S. interest in the likes of the top-secret MI5 and MI6. But it also became a popular movie in 2021 starring Colin Firth as Montagu and Matthew Macfadyen as Charles Cholmondeley, two of the main Mincemeat makers.

Now this yarn is a self-aware and droll Broadway musical, a five-character London hit hoping that its very British signature blend of Monty Python and “Goon Show”-like humor, “Billy Elliot”-like music, “Hamilton”-like rhythms and a hip, post-modern staging will tickle the American fancy.

And why not? This ripping yarn is a lot of fun and very clever to boot.

Certainly, the caper-driven “Operation Mincemeat” is an unusual tuner for New York’s main stem, given the small cast and four-piece band. Three of the four writers of the book, music and lyrics are also in the show (David Cumming, Natasha Hodgson and Zoë Roberts), which is very much a devised piece from a company called SpitLip, basically a fringe comedy company that says it specializes in “big, dumb musicals” but has amassed a formidable following. Which got these folks this far.

Felix Hagan is also on the writing team and Claire-Marie Hall and Jak Malone are the other imported Broadway performers working under Robert Hastie’s direction. Everybody plays numerous parts, assigned without regard to gender (there’s even a cameo for Fleming), but the anchors are Cumming’s Cholmondeley, the nerd who came up with the audacious idea, and Hodgson’s Montagu, the operation’s main manager and salesperson, even though there was in fact more to that character than first meets the eye. (Ssshh!)

Although it’s a retro wartime story, the overall sensibility here is both contemporary and self-aware, filled with sly critiques of the domination of the wartime intelligence services by members of the British ruling class, exerting their sexist ways. For the most part, the show is composed of zany humor bleeding into comic songs with witty internal rhymes (the songs of Tim Minchin are a helpful comparative). On a couple of occasions, the emotions are musically stirred (one of this show’s biggest assets and I wish there was more of that variety), but “Operation Mincemeat” is no feast of power ballads or choreographic variety. Silly ditties are far more prevalent and I suspect there is a subset of the Broadway-going public who will be driven crazy by that, especially since we are talking a two-and-half-hour show here.

I’m not a detractor, though, even if I would swear I heard some of the same notes at one point as found in “Once We Were Kings” in “Billy Elliot,” and thus can see the derivative argument. “Operation Mincemeat” comes off as a very fresh and intelligent Broadway idea and it’s performed at a high level, especially by Cumming and Hodgson, and that sense of quoting other shows, including obvious nods to Mel Brooks’ “The Producers” and a sly reference to King George in “Hamilton,” is very much baked into the self-aware aesthetic. Parody, after all, is always a great defense.

In the end, the story here is audacious enough to carry the show. At the conclusion, “Operation Mincemeat” blows its organic budget on some Broadway spectacle, confetti cannon and all, in a conscious but rather jarring way. I can see why SpitLip wanted to give New Yorkers their money’s worth, but the show’s biggest fault actually is its occasional inclination to go for the gag, even if it blows its carefully wrought internal reality. I wish that energy had been put into deepening the emotional force of a score that could and should go a lot further.

Still. Minor quibbles. It’s crazy that this thing happened. But it did.

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At the John Golden Theatre, 252 W. 45th St., New York; operationbroadway.com.

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