Editor’s Note: This is the final installment in our Mincemeat Medley series profiling the artistic forces behind Operation Mincemeat, following our features on David Cumming and Claire-Marie Hall.
It’s seven o’clock on a Friday night. Felix Hagan sits at a piano in 54 Below, affectionately known as “Broadway’s living room” among avid theatergoers in New York City. His hands dart across the keys in a fine frenzy. The room grows silent as he begins the opening notes of “Dear Bill,” a heart-wrenching ballad from Operation Mincemeat, the Olivier Award-winning musical he co-wrote. When he reaches the emotional crescendo, his voice shifts into a crystalline falsetto that sends a collective shiver through the audience. As the final note hangs in the air, Hagan breaks the spell with a self-deprecating quip: “Well, come along and hear that song sung several thousand orders of magnitude better by Mr. Jak Malone at the John Golden Theatre.”
This is classic Hagan: extraordinary talent wrapped in unassuming charm. The British composer and performer has journeyed from fronting the glam-rock band Felix Hagan & The Family to conquering the West End and now Broadway with a musical about one of World War II’s most outlandish espionage operations. Throughout it all, he’s maintained a remarkable artistic vision centered on emotional authenticity and unapologetic joy.
“I believe that music is the finest medium for delivering JOY,” Hagan declares in the Kickstarter for his upcoming solo album, aptly titled Happy Songs. “Joy in every form, be it dark and brooding to let the minor chords bellow forth and exorcise our sadness, or vast and colorful, to scream for togetherness in an ecstatic howl of pure happiness.”
Hagan’s journey to Broadway has been anything but conventional. Born in London and raised partially in the New Forest, he attended school “in the middle of nowhere in a big field,” as he puts it. After two years traveling around the world, he bounced between Liverpool, London, and now Manchester, gathering musical influences and honing his craft.
Rather than following his family’s path into finance, Hagan pursued music with relentless passion. He formed Felix Hagan & The Family, a raucous theatrical rock band that gained notoriety for their explosive live shows and genre-bending sound, combining anthem-like hooks with clever, emotionally resonant lyrics.
When I first heard “Some Kind of Hero,” it struck me as a perfect embodiment of Hagan’s musical philosophy: defiant optimism in the face of depression. The song’s narrator promises to “dance in the firing line” and “catch a bullet in [their] heart” for love. It’s larger-than-life, certainly, but there’s something about Hagan’s delivery that makes you believe every word.
Hagan’s early musical education was eclectic. “Back when I was younger, my main influences were Western musicals and 80s hair metal,” he explains. “That was music of big moments. It’s music of ‘I’m gonna do a guitar solo upside down and set sh*t on fire.’”
His older brother introduced him to bands like Guns N’ Roses. “Cut him open, and it’ll just say Van Halen all the way through his entire body,” Hagan says with affection. When they played music together at home—his brother on guitar, Hagan on drums—he learned a crucial lesson about performance: “You don‘t think of Slash sitting at home playing scales. You think of him swigging Jack Daniels on a big eagle that’s on fire. But you don’t get to play like that without being really, really good and dedicated to everything you’re doing.”
This early education in discipline that allows for theatrical excess would later inform both his approach to songwriting and performance, creating a signature style that balances technical musicianship with unabashed emotional expression. “I’ve always been trying to find ways to express feeling out of place in a way that brings all the other out-of-place people together,” Hagan explains, his voice quickening with enthusiasm. “It’s just my philosophy as a creator.”
The true turning point in Hagan’s career came when he and three collaborators—David Cumming, Natasha Hodgson, and Zoë Roberts—decided to form SpitLip and write a musical with West End ambitions. The subject they landed on was Operation Mincemeat, an outlandish World War II deception plot where British intelligence officers planted false invasion plans on a corpse dressed as a Royal Marines officer and allowed it to wash ashore in Spain, hoping the misinformation would reach Nazi high command.
“Tash’s brother listened to a podcast and thought, ‘This is hilarious,’” Hagan recalls. “We all listened to it, and there was not a flake of doubt in anyone’s mind. This is the story for us.”
What drew them to this peculiar historical footnote wasn’t just its inherent absurdity, but the rich dramatic possibilities it presented. “The story is so much bigger than our version,” Hagan explains. “There was so much stuff that was just so funny. I mean, if we had put in all the stuff that we wanted to put in, the show would have been like [Richard Wagner’s] Ring cycle. You would have had to go for several days to take it all in.”
Surprisingly, Operation Mincemeat isn’t common knowledge even in Britain. “You learn about Henry VIII and you learn about World War II, but you learn about rationing and bomb shelters and gas masks, and that’s about it,” Hagan notes. “Stories like this, which, let’s face it, don’t paint the British in the best light, stealing a corpse and all of this… It doesn‘t get taught.”
Rather than a straightforward historical dramatization, SpitLip crafted a madcap comedy with gender-blind casting and an unexpected emotional core. The gender-blind approach wasn’t a political statement but emerged organically from their backgrounds in fringe theater. “We all come from the fringe of the fringe of the fringe, where things being gender-blind isn’t even remarked upon,” Hagan says. “It’s just like having gender-flip casting is… You might as well say, ‘And they had scenery.’ It’s just part of it.”
This casting philosophy led to some of the show’s most memorable performances, including Natasha Hodgson playing Ewen Montagu and Jak Malone playing Hester Leggett. “When Jak plays Hester, it’s not ‘Oh, look, it’s a man aping the qualities of a woman,’” Hagan observes. “He just stands a bit differently and his voice changes, and he immediately embodies it. It’s like, ‘No, no, that’s that character, who just is a woman.’ That’s just what acting and theater are: gesturing very lightly towards a far deeper meaning.”
The show’s emotional resonance particularly shines in songs like “Dear Bill,” a harrowing letter Hester pens based on her experience during World War I. What begins as a chipper update about mundane domestic matters (“Next door’s Greyhound came into the garden this morning”) gradually unfolds into a devastating portrait of wartime loss. The song has become a standout moment in the production, routinely moving audiences to tears.
“I will never, ever forget playing it to an audience for the first time,” Hagan remembers on the stage of 54 Below. “The theater, when we first performed, was a fraction the size of this room. You could fit 20 of them into this space, and there was just […] a block of people in front of us. [When] we got to the end of the song, [I looked] at the audience, and [saw] these huge, heavy-shouldered builders, […] covered in plaster dust and […] puking with grief.”
Our conversation turns to the representation of women in the show, particularly how it handles their historical erasure. I mention how the character Hester tells Jean, “I don’t think that it’s people like you or me / That the crowds come to see,” reflecting their invisibility despite their crucial wartime contributions. While many musicals seek optimistic resolution, Operation Mincemeat’s approach feels more honest. Hagan’s response reveals a thematic depth beyond the show’s comedic veneer: “So much of the themes come back to ‘being part of something bigger than yourself.’ And that is the kind of lesson that Jean learns at that moment: it isn’t about medals for one individual, or suddenly running the whole place. It’s about using that system against itself, and having to put ego aside in the name of the mission. It’s the thing that Monty can never really do, but everyone else seemingly just does instinctively.”
The show began in tiny fringe venues before steadily building momentum, eventually transferring to the West End and winning the 2023 Olivier Award for Best New Musical. Now on Broadway, Operation Mincemeat has cemented the co-writers’ status as major compositional talents, though Hagan approaches his success with characteristic humility. “We’ve written the show that we wanted to see,” he reflects, “and I stand by every single creative decision made in that thing. And that’s kind of a precious thing, to be able to make something and then have it get to the level it’s gotten to, and never once feel like you’ve compromised on it.”
The collaborative writing process for Operation Mincemeat is fascinating, particularly Hagan’s description of “the seed”—finding the perfect phrase that encapsulates an entire song. “All of the musical theater that I adored—my favorite musical theater composers are Lionel Bart and Cole Porter—they were like athletes with lyricism,” Hagan explains. “Every single song has a phrase that fundamentally sums up the mood of the entire song.”
He offers examples from Operation Mincemeat: “If you write the lines ‘God, that’s brilliant / But listen to this’ on a piece of paper and hold it up, 99 times out of 100 people will say it with the same cadence and rhythm. So that will land in people’s brains very satisfyingly. After that, all you do is put that mood on top of that rhythm, and it gives you your melody.”
The process began with extensive story development. “We broke the story all together. The plot of Mincemeat and all the characterizations were born out of the four of us sitting around for uncountable hundreds of hours, with post-it notes with the names of scenes.”
This meticulous narrative groundwork provided the foundation for song development, allowing them to identify precisely where musical moments should occur. “We’ve got all our scenes laid out, and we go, ‘Okay, we’re going to need an ‘I want’ song here for Cholmondeley to kind of clue us in as to what his journey is going to be.’”
For the character of Charles Cholmondely—a socially awkward intelligence officer with an interest in natural science—this process led to one of the show’s most distinctive numbers. “We would think, ‘Well, he would express it in a weird way. He wouldn’t say, ‘Oh God, if only I was a bit more…’ He would say something like, ‘I wish I was a maggot.’ And then he would talk about maggots for ages, because that’s the thing he’s really interested in.’”
The resulting song, “Dead in the Water,” features Cholmondely frantically wishing he could transform into various creatures to escape his self-perceived inadequacies. The rapid-fire lyrics—”I wish I was a maggot, or a tadpole, or a termite, or a wasp”—create a feverish portrayal of social anxiety that’s simultaneously funny and poignant.
From there, the team would build out verses, choruses, and arrangements, constantly revising until they captured the precise emotional tone they sought. It’s a process that requires checking egos at the door. “No, chop it off and throw it in the bin. It doesn’t matter, because we’ve got the bit that perfectly crystallizes the idea,” Hagan says of their ruthless editing approach.
The collaborative spirit extended to casting. Rather than predetermining who would play which role, the SpitLip team allowed the pieces to fall into place naturally. “The casting was almost to help with that decision-making process,” Hagan explains. “It was only when Jak came in and was so mesmerizing as Hester that we were like, ‘Well, okay, he’s obviously got to be that.’”
For Hagan, writing for specific performers transformed his compositional approach. “I’ve been writing music for [the actors’] specific voices for the last several years, which is unbelievably helpful, particularly if you’re writing endless amounts of five-part harmony.” With intimate knowledge of each cast member’s vocal strengths, SpitLip could craft harmonies that played to their individual talents: “Dave has a particular kind of nice mid-range peak in his voice, which makes him really nice on thirds down at the bottom. And Jack has this range the size of the Grand Canyon, but is able to be light and graceful all the way through that range.”
Now, Hagan is preparing to release his most personal work yet—a solo album titled Happy Songs. The irony of the name isn’t lost on him. “Happy Songs, I thought, that‘s clever. Then I looked at it and thought, that’s pretty [ironic]. But […] they’re not songs that are happy, they’re songs about a quest for happiness,” he shares at 54 Below.
In the title track, Hagan openly acknowledges this evolution: “When I started writing every song was like a sugared rainbow / Now the notes are muted and they’re bleeding out in shades of gray,” he sings in the opening lines. Later in the chorus, he offers a promise—or perhaps a prayer: “One day I’ll get back to the happy songs / The ones where the man ain’t broken.”
The album comes after what Hagan describes as a period where he “completely lost [his] mind a few years ago” and had to rebuild. The process of recovery is reflected in the music itself. “When the songs start coming, you know you’re getting better,” he says. “Because if you’ve got a brain like mine, you‘re processing it all, and it’s turning into music… The emotions are crystallizing to a point where you can express them in a way that people can relate to.”
The upcoming “Sound of My Heart” confronts panic attacks head-on, as “the most thundering, loop-in-your-face, disco song you’ve ever heard.” The contrast between the challenging subject matter and exuberant sound creates a uniquely cathartic experience. “I wanted to write a song that other people that have panic attacks could whack on and just feel enormously validated, having the negative things that you feel screamed out of a radio,” he explains.
The album also includes more tender moments. “That’s My Baby,” which Hagan performed at 54 Below, embraces musical theater conventions, complete with a key change. “The temptation would be, ‘This is very schmaltzy. Let’s make it not schmaltzy,‘” he says. “But I was like, ’No, f*ck it. Musical theater rules. I‘m going to reach for the key change.’”
This willingness to wear his heart on his sleeve stands in stark contrast to much contemporary music. “I hear a lot of cynicism in pop nowadays,” I suggest, “it’s like many folks are falling out of love with the concept of love itself.” Hagan nods knowingly. “When it comes to love songs, I’ve just got to express them as loudly as possible,” he insists. “That’s what love is to me. It’s like wanting the person you’re with and feeling the same from them—that they want you to be exactly who you are as loudly as humanly possible. Take all of the things that make you yourself and turn them up. It shouldn’t be compromise. It should be amplification.”
The album also reflects lessons learned from his years writing for Operation Mincemeat. “Having spent so long working in this world, you learn so much— about arrangement, being a character… that it’s not just ‘write some lyrics and then the cool tune that works with it.’” This commitment to musical authenticity manifests in the production. “I wanted people to hear the dust coming off the piano. I want them to hear every single bit of it,” he says passionately.
During our conversation, Hagan speaks candidly about how personal struggles have informed his artistry. Two years ago, he received an autism diagnosis that helped him make sense of his experiences. ”Suddenly having that slapped upon you makes you turn around and look at the last—God, far too many—years and think, holy sh*t, that explains a lot,” he admits. “You’re viewing your entire life through this new prism. And it’s like, well, this is why emotions are so loud, and love in particular.” Rather than trying to dampen these intense feelings, Hagan has transformed them into his greatest artistic strength, with his songs functioning as what he calls “lightning rods” for individual experiences. “I’m not trying to make everyone feel the same,” he explains. “I’m allowing everyone’s version of the same thing to coalesce.”
This pursuit stems partly from his experience as a neurodivergent person navigating social expectations he found baffling. “I just remember, from when I was tiny, suddenly everyone fancies each other, and everyone’s doing this kind of bizarre courtly dance of seduction with one another. I didn’t have a clue what was going on, and the whole thing was sort of terrifying. I didn’t understand the rules, and I still don’t.”
The social confusion that accompanies autism shaped both his approach to human connection and his creative process. Rather than trying to decode and conform to social norms, Hagan found liberation in creating spaces where emotions could be expressed without filtering.
“As someone who has had to mask so much for so much of life, you’re so familiar with the process of this vast dam of feeling and having to sublimate it all through a million different social codes, then have it drip out in a way that could be deemed acceptable or ‘normal,’” he explains. “So when it’s my stage and time to create a noise that people are going to hear, I’m not going to dilute this.” When it comes to love songs, Hagan rejects the jaded distance common in contemporary music. “I don’t write songs like, ‘Oh, I quite fancy this person. I think they’re kind of all right,’” he scoffs. “No, I need to kind of scream about this magical individual that I’ve met, and how it’s changed the way that I view everything.”
This approach has connected him deeply with both neurodivergent and queer communities. “In a world where you always felt weird, go and find the people who take their weirdness and scream it as loud as they possibly can… That Venn diagram is a circle.”
Before launching into “Gene Kelly” at 54 Below, Hagan recounts two career goals he shared with his agent: “I want to write the songs in a Disney movie. And I want to meet Elton John.” These dreams speak to his continued belief in music as a transformative, incomparable force. He still measures success not by commercial metrics but by emotional impact.
“100 people back-flipping on roller skates through stuff that’s on fire, and Axl Rose screaming into a microphone in front of 100,000 people… It’s kind of bled into my musical DNA,” he says. “That’s not the level that one should be aiming for. It’s just the level that music is.”
With Operation Mincemeat now on Broadway and his solo album nearing completion, Hagan finds himself at an enviable artistic juncture. The musical continues to draw critical acclaim and devoted audiences, while his personal work allows him to explore more vulnerable territory. Through it all, he maintains the same principle that has guided his career: the pursuit of authentic emotion, expressed without apology.
When describing Happy Songs, Hagan proudly calls it his “best work, a collection of songs that are real, raw, and performed straight from the depths of [his] soul.” There’s no ironic distance, no performative coolness—just the earnest desire to connect.
One of the most powerful examples is “Breathe In, Breathe Out,” a song that functions almost as a guided meditation for anxiety. The repeated mantra—”They’re just emotions / Drops in the ocean / So let your feelings go”—offers both comfort and perspective. When performed live, Hagan turns the song into a communal experience, dividing the audience into sections to create harmonies, transforming a deeply personal song into an exercise in bridging out. This moment encapsulates his artistic mission: creating spaces where individual voices can come together to form something greater than the sum of their parts.
As he prepares for his album release, Felix Hagan remains committed to creating music that refuses to play small—compositions that leverage theatrical grandeur to offer listeners “a second of something real” amid life’s chaos. “It’s expressing uniqueness as a badge of beautiful, furious pride,” he says of his artistry. This commitment extends to his views on existence itself: “Life is so short, and so much of it is so boring. When you get the chance to leap into a technicolor, five-dimensional whirlpool of joy, you need to leap.”
SpitLip’s musical Operation Mincemeat is now playing at the John Golden Theatre on Broadway. Felix Hagan’s solo album Happy Songs will be released later this year.
