'The Producers' wages war on Hitler with laughter
Azesty revival of The Producers (2001), the Mel Brooks musical, is now running at the Broadway Theatre in Pitman, N.J. Once again we get to laugh at the desperate maneuvering of Max Bialystok and Leo Bloom, producers who intentionally create a show that is so bad they assume it will immediately fold.
A zesty revival of The Producers (2001), the Mel Brooks musical, is now running at the Broadway Theatre in Pitman, N.J. Once again we get to laugh at the desperate maneuvering of Max Bialystok and Leo Bloom, producers who intentionally create a show that is so bad they assume it will immediately fold.
Then they plan to skip town with the production money Max has bilked from little old ladies. But the scam comes a cropper when their show, Springtime For Hitler, turns into a campy hit. It is wonderful satire, and in the 1967 movie version you never forget Max's shock when the audience rolls in laughter on opening night.
This darkly comic send-up of Hitler and Nazism is lightened in the musical version Mel Brooks developed 30 years later. There is simply so much electricity and ribald humor in the song and dance numbers that the show never reaches a dramatic climax.
Director Drew Molotsky takes up the musical on its own terms. His production is ablaze with shifting lights (by Shawn McGovern), eye-popping clothes (by Kate Edelson) and dazzling physical movement (by Kate Meditz). A live orchestra (conducted by Jack Hill) lends needed musical body to Brooks' witty but non-melodic score.
C.J. Kish and Franke Sisto are well paired as Max and Leo. In "Betrayed," Kish is hilarious as he recounts two hours of madcap events. Franz (David Nikolas) is finely comical as the humorless Nazi who takes literally the advice to "break a leg," which gives cross-dressing director Roger (Darrin Peters) the chance to play Adolph. And you could watch leggy Ulla (Gabrielle Sanitate) and gay blade Carmen (Armando Mendez) all night.
The show abounds in references to theater, as in the Busby Berkeley-style chorus line of Nazi babes, and in the way Hitler engages the audience in the fashion of Judy Garland. Brooks' destruction of Nazism through ridicule still resonates, but in the musical it takes a back seat to his whimsical love of theater. In an odd way, a backhanded respect for Hitler himself starts to creep in on mere theatrical terms. The Producers is as funny as it is because Naziism, for all its brutality and inhumanity, was also theater.