Still gleefully and resonantly funny
‘It’s guaranteed to offend all races, colours and creeds!” yells theatre producer Max Bialystock in delight, in a scene from Mel Brooks’s 1967 comedy The Producers. He and his partner Leo Bloom are searching for the worst play ever written, so that they can produce a sure-fire Broadway flop and keep the million-dollar investment.
But that play, Springtime for Hitler, a love letter to the Führer turned into a camp fantasia by its shockingly bad director, becomes a stonking Broadway hit. There’s no accounting for taste but, as both the plot of The
Producers and the rampant popularity of the film suggests, there is no accounting for bad taste either.
Except of course, and as Raz Shaw’s entirely confident revival of the 2001 musical confirms, The Producers itself was never in bad taste. It says everything about how nervous we’ve become these days about comedy that we now approach with some trepidation a show that glories in the kitsch spectacle of goose-stepping Nazis.
Yet the sly beauty of Brooks’s script lies in the fact that it never confuses the subject of a joke with its target. Yes, it flirts freely with broad social stereotypes, notably the gay director Roger De Bris and his flock of preening assistants, and Ulla, the pneumatic Swedish secretary, but the joke is always on the hapless crooks at the centre, Max and Leo, trying, and failing, to make a fast buck out of a failure.
And what a joke it is. Shaw’s exuberantly funny production remains scrupulously faithful to the musical, co-written by Brooks, and which inspired a film featuring Nathan Lane, the original Broadway star.
As Bialystock, Julius D’silva has big shoes to fill, and conveys neither the grubby desperation of Zero Mostel from the 1967 film, tupping rich old nymphomaniacs in return for a “chequey”, nor the lunatic waspishness of Lane. But just as he is less obviously cruel towards his wizened backers, who dance with gusto with their Zimmer frames in Along Came Bialy, so there is a lovely buddy-movie-style warmth in his relationship with Stuart Neal’s fretful Leo.
Neal, for his part, is pitch-perfect as a tremulous neurotic perched permanently on the cusp of a breakdown. Emily-mae has a tougher job making Ulla more than just a sexpot, but her knowing performance also manages to imply that Ulla has Max and Leo exactly where she wants them. Meanwhile, Hammed Animashaun steals every scene as Carmen, De Bris’s queeny assistant.
Shaw beautifully scales down a massive Broadway show into a tiny in-the-round space without compromising on pizzazz. A single prop evokes an entire setting: Broadway itself is represented by a miniature light-box theatre.
The beloved rooftop aviary of Franz Liebkind, the unhinged Hitler apologist playwright, is represented by hand-held puppet pigeons – Liebkind’s favourite, Adolf, sports a black moustache. Beautifully choreographed chorus lines snake, Busby Berkeley style, back and forth across the revolving stage.
At the heart of The Producers is a gleeful send up of the narcissistic pomp surrounding tyrannical power regimes – here, in Springtime for Hitler, the high-kicking Nazi faithful sport giant pretzels and Bratwurst sausages on their headgear.
Furthermore, the satirical swipes at deluded fanatics hit home today even harder than they did in 2001. Fifty years on, it is not only still giddily, resonantly funny, but no race, colour or creed should find themselves remotely offended.