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At long last The Producers
BY CAROLYN CLAY
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The Producers is a funny, flamboyant throwback, though not one you’d want to throw back — unless, of course, you’re a particularly trigger-happy member of the political-correctness police. The satire-spangled 2001 Broadway musical Mel Brooks exploded from his crass but memorable 1968 film about a couple of theater-smitten scammers who try to make a fortune by overcapitalizing a Broadway valentine to Adolf Hitler won every Tony Award for which it was eligible: a record 12. Two years later, it has finally opened in Boston, where the new touring production will remain at the Colonial Theatre through September 13, offering such retro rewards as willowy chorines, lowdown humor, dance dazzle, and summer camp. Not to mention a swishy singing Hitler, a Ziegfeld parade of beauties crowned with beer and pretzels, and a Busby Berkeley dance-formation swastika, all in the coup de gr‰ce ÒSpringtime for HitlerÓ number, which is what most people remember from the movie. Lavish, shameless, and exuding the energy of nuclear fission, The Producers is old-fashioned Borscht Belt as it might be delivered by Mike Tyson (who, if he were in the show, would sing like Paul Robeson delivering ÒOl’ Man RiverÓ). Both an homage to and a send-up of the Broadway of Brooks’s youth and middle age, a world where David Merrick rather than Cameron Mackintosh and the corporations dominated, The Producers is pushier than it needs to be. But it’s vulgar, spectacular fun, in Susan Stroman’s deliriously over-the-top production a German-spoofing machine as precisely calibrated as a Mercedes. Max Bialystock (Zero Mostel in the movie, Nathan Lane on Broadway) is a has-been producer — a dethroned Òking of old Broadway.Ó The curtain rises on the opening-cum-closing night of his umpteenth flop: Funny Boy, a musical version of Hamlet. Leopold Bloom (Gene Wilder in the movie, Matthew Broderick on Broadway) is a mousy accountant who hardly lives up to his Joycean moniker. But it’s he who comes up with the notion that a producer could actually make more money on a flop than a hit, since he’d not be expected to pay back investors (in Max’s case, a cadre of horny old ladies banging Stomp-worthy rhythms with their metal walkers). The trick is to find a surefire bomb, to which end B&B secure the rights to Springtime for Hitler, which was written by a FŸhrer-loving, lederhosen-wearing crackpot named Franz Liebkind. They hire Roger De Bris, a flaming queen with an effeminate Òcommon-law assistantÓ called Carmen Ghia, to direct it. They break every luck-garnering directive in the larder of theater superstition. And along the way they acquire a bombshell ÒactressÓ secretary named Ulla, who looks like a million dollars, talks like the Swedish chef, and has the terpsichorean sizzle of contact’s Girl in the Yellow Dress. Unfortunately for the scheme, the show — whose hilariously inappropriate and overproduced title tune, featuring dancing Nazi manikins and a Hitler (the excellent Lee Roy Reams) suspended between Judy Garland and Ethel Merman, is the highlight of The Producers — is perceived as a satiric masterpiece. This Producers is brighter and more sentimental than the film. And its generically infectious, klezmer-tinged score and wild production numbers wink at musical-theater classics from Fiddler to Follies. Brooks, of course, is an anomaly, juggling Shakespearean allusion with fart jokes, audacious invention with routines hoarier than the 2000 Year Old Man. But Stroman brings out the essence, for better and worse, of the material, urging it to the highest leaps (including a few sprung from trampolines) and to sewer-level depths. She also adds a surreal element, as when showgirls emerge from the file cabinets amid the slave-driven misery of Bloom’s quaint accounting office to dance him into a champagne fantasy. (It was smart not to update the show, which hovers between Cole Porter’s era and Jule Styne’s.) Much was made of the chemistry, in the Broadway staging, between Lane and Broderick. And all the Ulla ogling notwithstanding, the title characters are the focus of this hambone love story. Brad Oscar, who originally played the biergarten-bonkers Liebkind and then replaced Lane on Broadway, is the Max of the production. Sleazy yet lovable, he’s an amalgam of Phil Silvers, Lane hangover, and his own considerable talent, as is most evident in his tour de force delivery of the jailhouse aria ÒBetrayed,Ó in which he not only vents his spleen but recaps the entire show. The even more overwrought Andy Taylor, as Bloom, is less nervous nerd than fullblown hysteric, seemingly out to decapitate himself with his security blanket. He has an incongruously romantic singing voice, though, that comes in handy when he finally gives in to Ulla (a lilting and leggy Ida Leigh Curtis), surrendering to the Fred-and-Ginger seduction of ÒThat Face.Ó Subtlety has never been a hallmark of Mel Brooks, and it’s not one of The Producers. But this production, far from a whittled-down replica of the original, is as extravagant as the shtick, the whole glitzy vaudeville enterprise coming at the audience like a well-oiled tank polished to a sheen. Just take your seat and get out of its way.
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