2024 - 2025 Broadway Musical Logos: Operation Mincemeat

One of the season's most highly anticipated shows, and winner of the Olivier for Best Musical in the West End, Operation Mincemeat, so far Broadway fans polarized, and seem to either love it or hate it and not much in between. We haven't seen it yet (but we'll let you know what we really think of it when we do), but we have seen the show logo. And we have thoughts...

2024 - 2025 Broadway Musical Logos:

Operation Mincemeat

Well, it certainly is eye-catching, what with its yellow hugeness. The show art itself is minimal and minuscule all at once. All of that can be either a great thing or an awful thing. Polarizing.

Yellow has a variety of symbolic meanings, some of which may apply here. It can mean joy, happiness and energy, all things one hopes to find in a musical comedy. But it can also stand for caution and danger, apropos for a show about a risky undercover operation during World War II, and of course, it represents cowardice. How you see the whole situation may decide if cowardice is even at play, I suppose.

Then there's the title (the minuscule part I referred to above) which is tiny in comparison to the entire logo. In a way, it is clever, because you really have to look at it to even see what it is.

You'll notice that it is in the shape of a briefcase, with "Operation" shaped like the top flap of one. You probably need to understand the show's subject matter to recognize that spies often carry such attache cases. But the real fun comes in taking it as part of the whole piece. But first... that odd squiggle.

The largest part of the key art, it really draws the eye, doesn't it? Is it black marker graffiti? Is it some kind of coded lettering? No... Again, you need to look at the logo as one entity: black squiggle + tiny black briefcase = .... Hitler!

Once you see it you can't unsee it, right?

Ultimately, how successful the show art is in business/ticket sales terms remains to be seen. Will it appeal to the masses or is it too niche? For me, the logo alone isn't enough to really interest me; it depends on having to know too much about the show to get it. And these days, how many tourists are going to be interested in a fascist-adjacent production?

Grade: C