Alan Johnson
Choreographer who devised the Springtime for Hitler sequence in Mel Brooks’s film The Producers
ALAN JOHNSON, who has died aged 81, was best known to British cinema audiences as the choreographer of Springtime for Hitler: A Gay Romp With Adolf and Eva at Berchtesgaden, the jaw-dropping musical showpiece of Mel Brooks’s comedy The Producers (1968); he was also responsible for the preservation of the original Jerome Robbins choreography for West Side Story.
Johnson’s association with West Side Story began in 1958 when he was cast as a replacement Shark in the original Broadway production. He became the show’s “dance captain”, tasked by Robbins with learning everyone’s steps to ensure that his choreography was followed.
At Robbins’s suggestion, Johnson went on to restage the show with the original choreography for stage revivals. Altogether he was estimated to have choreographed 25 productions of the musical, including, in Britain, in London, Plymouth and Glasgow.
Johnson recalled that he had first met Mel Brooks at a party, “and he told me this idea he had for a movie called The Producers and I just laughed.” Johnson’s first job in film, The Producers, starred Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder as an ageing producer and his accountant sidekick who must stage a Broadway “guaranteed-to-close-in-onenight beauty” and steal the money invested in it by unsuspecting old ladies in order to stay financially solvent.
They buy the rights to a play depicting Adolf Hitler as a misunderstood hero, hiring a guitar-playing hippie to portray the Führer and turning the play into a high camp, goose-stepping-and-showgirls extravaganza, complete with Busby Berkeley dance numbers and lines such as “Don’t be stupid/be a smarty/come and join the Nazi Party”. To their dismay they come up with the hit of the season.
Brooks’s taste in production numbers did not change much, and neither did his choice of choreographers. For his History of the World, Part I (1981) Johnson choreographed a Busby Berkeley treatment of the Spanish Inquisition, complete with a chorus line consisting of torturers, monks, Jews and a bevy of precision swimming nuns. For Young Frankenstein (1974), he choreographed a routine in which Dr Frederick Frankenstein (Gene Wilder) takes to the floor with his monster (Peter Boyle) in formal wear to Irving Berlin’s Puttin’ on the Ritz.
Some wondered whether, if Brooks had not been Jewish and Johnson gay, they could possibly have got away with it. In 2001, one American reviewer recalled that the pair had been the team behind another “Hitler-as-humour” farce, the 1983 film To Be or Not To Be, a remake of Ernst Lubitsch’s 1942 comedy (directed this time by Johnson and starring Brooks and his real-life wife Anne Bancroft). Of the film’s classic line, “Let’s face it – without Jews, fags and Gipsies there would be no theatre!”, the reviewer noted that the two men “gave legitimacy to that gag in a way that a gentile/ straight creative team never could”.
Alan Scott Johnson was born on February 18 1937, at Eddystone, Pennsylvania, the son of a shipyard worker and a waitress who took her son to dance classes from the age of six. After leaving school he moved to New York, where he appeared in various Broadway shows, later turning to choreography.
His other work for Mel Brooks included dance routines in his western parody Blazing Saddles (1974), notably a number featuring Dom Deluise as a petulant choreographer rehearsing a troupe of men in top hats and tails as they sing, “Throw out your hands/stick out your tush/hands on your hips/give them a push!”. He also directed Solarbabies (1986), a Brooks attempt at sci-fi that was panned by critics.
As well as West Side Story, Johnson staged shows for Chita Rivera, Leslie Uggams, Bernadette Peters, Peter Allen and Shirley Maclaine. He won three Emmy Awards and five nominations for his television specials, and a Tony nomination for his work on Legs Diamond (1988).