My Cultural Awakening: Operation Meatball Taught Me How to Cry — and Now I Cry About Everything | Musicals

I I’m sure I used to cry as a child, but by my teens the crying had stopped. Maybe it was about boarding school. The upper lip is very stiff. My parents aren’t the most emotionally available humans either. I like to tease them by saying, “I love you.” You can see the panic in their eyes. They’ll usually say, “Okay, bye.”

My grandmother died when I was about 18, and I was sad, of course, but in terms of tears there was nothing, no water. I never cry at movies. I didn’t cry on my wedding day, nor when any of my daughters were born. It never bothered me. I actually thought I might have underactive tear glands. Looking back, maybe it was all about control.

In 2023, I went to see the musical Operation Mincemeat for the first time in the West End. What struck me was the humor, much of it aimed at the public school culture I grew up in. I didn’t cry then but I had the desire to see him again. I think it was probably my third or fourth time going when I got the song Dear Bill. They appear in the middle of the musical and the words take the form of a letter from a woman to her husband who is away fighting in World War II. I was shocked to find myself crying. I had to go back and see it with my wife, Yael, to prove to her that I could now cry. I definitely thought I was a bit emotionally repressed. When the song came I took her hand and put it to the side of my eye. Her face was one of utter shock.

I thought about why it opened something up inside of me and I think it’s because the song itself has so many layers of repression. The character she sings, Hester Leggatt, rarely shows any emotion. The lyrics themselves only speak of the pain of separation through the metaphor of tending to roses. There’s a line about how flowers are dull and unblooming. I thought: Is this how my wife and children see me?

As the song continues, we witness the gradual release of Hester’s true feelings: anger, guilt, and all sorts of feelings pouring out. One line – “Why did we meet in the middle of a war, what a ridiculous thing for anyone to do” – was written with the sobering message on which the song is based. Which added another layer to it.

One thing you might notice the third time you go is that in the middle of the song, Hester mistakenly says the name of her former love, Tom, instead of Belle, the fictional character to whom she is writing the letter. That moment is particularly poignant. I’ve now watched Operation Mincemeat 29 times, with trip 30 already booked. I often cried over Dear Bill, but then moved on to other songs, like “Helpful,” about women whose important wartime work went largely unrewarded. Now when I see the show I almost cry when I get there. It’s like a Pavlovian response once you hear the intro music.

I also saw the musical on Broadway with my family, and met the actors at the stage door. I am a teacher and took my year 6 children to see it. I think I heard some gasps during this, and I wasn’t alone.

Since then I’ve found myself crying in a lot of situations outside of the ground beef process. It was like learning a new skill. I always cry now when I watch Interstellar. When my class saw Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, one of my students said, “Look, Mr. Allen is crying!” I even cried at a bloody Brandi Carlile concert, and that’s not my type of music. She sang a song that was basically a goodbye to her children’s innocence, and I had tears streaming down my face. Even Yael thought it was a bit exaggerated, and would cry when she heard Dove’s announcement.

I’ve definitely become a more rounded person. When a dear friend of mine, Josh, died of stomach cancer at the age of 34, suddenly, I went to the funeral and was an absolute mess. Josh knew what I was like before, so I liked to imagine him looking at me crying and finding it funny. But in a strange way it felt good. It would have been terrible to sit there and bottle it up. Instead, this was a healer. We went for drinks afterward and I felt as if I had really had it all. Without the ground beef process, I’m honestly not sure I would have been able to do this.