Jak Malone’s Guide to Singing the Best New Song on Broadway

ABLUpdated 2 days Ago7 Mins read1

Halfway into Broadway’s new WWII farce Operation Mincemeat, Hester Leggatt, a stern secretary, stops the show in its tracks with “Dear Bill.” The six-minute ode feels like a separate production from the rest of the musical — a true showstopper. The otherwise frantic show gives way to a crushing, stoic reflection. Crying is inevitable. And so, perhaps, is Jak Malone’s Tony.

Malone, a 31-year-old man, plays the aging woman Hester — along with an American pilot, a macabre undertaker, and multiple other characters — as part of a five-person ensemble.

Malone began the process as simply a superfan of the theater company SpitLip, which current cast members Natasha Hodgson, David Cumming, and Zoë Roberts were a part of. Then, they cast him. The production began at the 80-seat New Diorama Theatre in London in 2019, but, powered by word of mouth, Mincemeat took over bigger theaters, eventually landing on the West End and winning the Olivier Award for Best Musical, with Malone scoring Best Actor in a Supporting Role. Now, Mincemeat has been playing at the Golden Theatre on Broadway since March 20, and Malone is in awe. “I am very, very grateful,” Malone said. “They wrote this entire brilliant musical and gave a stranger the best song in it.”

How did you come to know Kill the Beast, the group that predated SpitLip?
My first exposure to them, like some sort of disease, was at the 2016 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. I was in drama school at the time, and, before that summer, one of our teachers had said, “You’ve had your first year and, this summer, you find exactly what it is that you want to do, because you need something to strive towards.” I’d forgotten about that, but seeing the show, I went, “There it is.”

You didn’t want to start your own group?
No. They were already doing the best version of it, and I wanted to join in. I started a campaign for them to notice me — a lot of that was replying to them on Twitter with niche references to the show. And fan art. I drew them a lot of fan art.

What attracted you to them?
Their plays had all of the references to the things that I loved: ’70s horror movies, a British comedy troupe called the League of Gentlemen. In their shows, whoever was the best person for the character played that character, which was something I was really interested in exploring.

I started sending in fan art. I was making posters, doing homages to traditional ’70s horror posters with their characters. They’ve since told me that they were furious because they were like, This guy’s out here creating posters that are better than the posters we actually use for our shows.

How did you get cast in Mincemeat?
They announced open-call auditions, and I applied. They knew me as a fan, and they were like, This might be a little bit awkward because he’s such a big fan, but let’s let him audition. I auditioned and I left the room and Natasha said, “He’s clearly better than any of us.” So I got the part, and I’ve been with them ever since.

What were your audition songs?
“Born to Lead” and “Let Me Die in Velvet,” which is a song that’s been cut from the show. They asked for a section of rap. I did “Starships,” by Nicki Minaj.

When you got cast in Mincemeat, were the tracks already decided?
They wanted a cast of five, and that’s all they knew. They cast me with an inkling that I would be good as Hester and that I could do justice for the song “Dear Bill.” On day one of rehearsals, they’d sent me “Dear Bill” as a demo. It was the first thing we did.

What did you think when you first heard “Dear Bill?”
I was a little bit daunted by the layers of the song. In the scene, she’s helping them write a love letter from the fictional pilot’s fiancée that is to go into the briefcase of the fictional pilot that they’ve made. But within that, she is remembering her lost love and the things that she said to him in World War I, and then she says things to him as if he were here. It all builds to this magnum opus of grief.

I was very impressed with their ability to capture the mundanity of grief. There are plenty of songs about grief, but this is about someone trying to get through the day even though a person is informing their every thought. And that’s miserable. I related to it a lot.

How so?
My Nanny Joan, my maternal grandmother, was my favorite person in the world, and she also happened to be the first person I lost. She was the president of my fan club, and I miss her terribly to this day. It’s been 12 years since she passed. People lose grandparents, but she was my best thing. To this day, when I’m doing something really exciting and incredible, I think, What’s the point if Nanny Joan’s not here? I dedicated my Olivier Award to Nanny Joan. I wanted to scream her name in the Royal Albert Hall, so I did.

Do you think about her while you’re performing “Dear Bill”?
It’s impossible not to. Hester is based on Nanny Joan, which I didn’t realize until a long way into the process. People thought that Nanny Joan was stern or joyless, whereas I knew her to be hilarious. She loved jokes and pranks; she loved playing the card game Snap and was an incredibly sore winner. She’d laugh in my face. That’s who Hester is to me. It’s almost impossible not to sing the lyrics, “Even now I still miss you,” and not think about how she’d be on the front row every night. She’d have moved to New York.

How do you keep your poise during such an emotional performance?
She doesn’t go completely, and she doesn’t break, because if Tom were there, she wouldn’t. She says before she writes it that her job is to make him feel like everything is going to go back to normal when he gets home. In spite of crossing those boundaries and losing her grip on what reality she’s in, she doesn’t let her job go, which is to put on a brave face for somebody who’s going through something incredibly terrifying. The whole song is a tumble down into somewhere that she hasn’t gone in years because she doesn’t want to go there.

Audiences must be surprised by the tonal shift of the song from the rest of the show, especially since it’s still early in the Stateside run.
There’s a lot of laughs in the song, and the scene prior is very funny. There are certain audiences where, as the song progresses, the laughs get more and more tenuous. They’re laughing at things that not everybody laughs at, because they’re going, It’s still funny, right? Then, when I say “Tom” instead of Bill, and Charlie and Jean exchange a look, that’s when the audience realizes, Poor Hester.

There’s something really fun that’s happening in America that didn’t happen in London. After the song ends, she trails off because she can’t bear to finish her thought, and in London there would always be a moment of silence before a tentative applause that everyone would join in. Here on Broadway, there’s a collective outbreath. The entire audience goes “Wow” together at the same time. When 800 people do that, it’s actually quite loud.

How did the first performances of “Dear Bill” go back in 2019?
I thought “Dear Bill” was going to get cut because I worried it would halt the story and that people were going to be like, “We don’t care about this.” Then we did the very first show and people were really crying. Back then, “Dear Bill” didn’t get an applause break. But the audience didn’t laugh at the whole next scene because they were livid. The applause break got added in, and then they were satiated.

Once every few years, I’ll see a show and think, That song will be sung for the next hundred years. Right now, it’s yours.
It’s almost too huge to think about. This show has really informed how I think about legacy, because a lot of the show’s characters, especially Jean and Hester, are wrapped up in legacy.

I can’t read music, so when I wanted to learn a new song that really ignited me, I would listen to the cast album again and again. The idea that there are people out there who think, My goodness, I need to learn this. Therefore, I have to listen to Jak Malone sing it 200 times, is amazing.

What advice do you have for the people who will sing “Dear Bill” in college programs, cabarets, etc.?
Be careful where you decide to sing it. I’ve had people say that they’d like to sing it at an audition. You’d have to do an extract because it’s six and a half minutes long, so the panel aren’t going to be too happy. And be careful about how much work you’re asking your panel or your audience to do. I have the benefit of the whole show to tell them who this woman is and that I am a woman. To go into an audition panel and suddenly present as this war-torn widow might be a bit of a stretch.

But for anybody else, if you’re singing a cabaret or an open mic or something, every night I keep my hand movements pretty much 95 percent the same every show. It is a long song, and “Why did we meet in the middle of a war?” is repeated a few times. My hand movements are my map at any given point in the number. It’s the logistics of the thing. You have to really stay on the ball.

How do you process going from SpitLip fan to Olivier winner to starring on Broadway?
I have to go along with it. Otherwise, I think my head would explode. I don’t know if I believe in fate, and I don’t really believe in manifesting things. I believe in putting in the effort and doing the work, but there is something pretty weird about how I was told that summer, “Go and find what you want to do.” I found what I wanted to do. I get to use all of my skills, and I’m playing a character that is very similar to my Nanny Joan, who’s someone that I’m constantly thinking about, and now I’m on Broadway, which is my lifelong dream. It makes me wonder if somebody somewhere has gone, “Yeah, we’ll give him a good go of it before he dies.”