Television | Flaunting it

Flaunting it
A TV taste of The Producers

Of all the intentions ascribed to public television, surely none would include Òrescue mission,Ó but that omission is about to be corrected with Recording ÒThe ProducersÓ: A Musical Romp with Mel Brooks. In a humanitarian gesture to the thousands of anguished persons unable to secure tickets to the Broadway musical, PBS’s Great Performances is offering a telecast based on the recording session for the show’s soundtrack album. To be sure, it’s not the real thing, but Nathan Lane, Matthew Broderick, and the rest of the cast are on hand, singing their hearts out while leaving intact the one-liners that Brooks has stuffed among the lyrics. There are even a few moments of dancing for background sound effects, with plenty of gestures and body language. And hearing the 74-year-old Brooks belt the lyrics to his ÒHaben Sie gehšrt das deutsche Band?Ó in a Borscht Belt growl is an added attraction.

In case you’ve been lost in an underground cave and haven’t heard, the Mel Brooks musical The Producers, based on his 1968 Oscar-winning film of the same name, walked off with 12 Tony Awards this spring, an all-time record. Obtaining a pair of tickets to a performance in New York is about as easy as finding the Holy Grail. Brooks transformed the film, with the help of book writer Thomas Meehan and director/choreographer Susan Stroman, and wrote music and lyrics for 16 new songs while retaining three from the original. In whole or in part, 13 of these numbers are included in the telecast. If Brooks is not a one-man Rodgers and Hammerstein, he knows how to punch out a tune that runs ’round in your head.

The program follows the chronology of that packed day in the recording studio when the company had only eight hours to lay down the entire soundtrack album before union rules on overtime pay kicked in. As performers in front of a camera, the actors are turned on, despite the off-stage nature of the gig. Brooks serves as an Ÿber-narrator, allowing time for the songs to be dropped in.

The Producers is a gloss on the Cinderella story that’s set in a Broadway fairyland and told with a wholesale irreverence for the niceties of political correctness. A wuss of an accountant, Leo Bloom, languishes in the cinders of an office until he meets the irrepressible Max Bialystock, a failed Broadway producer with nothing more than a rented tux to his name. When Bloom comes up with a scam that ensures the pair will make more money on a flop than a hit, the game begins. Interviewed on the program, Stroman describes Lane’s Bialystock (created by Zero Mostel in the film) as Òloud and brash, a real theatrical animal,Ó in contrast to Broderick’s Bloom (Gene Wilder’s role), who is Òvery shy, with a little bit of the neurotic New Yorker in him.Ó

Bialystock and Bloom concoct a scheme to produce the worst play they can find, and they hit paydirt with a musical called Springtime for Hitler that’s brought to life in the play-within-a-play by the fŸhrer as an Ethel Merman look-alike queen with a moustache. It’s hard to imagine who’s been left off the list of the offended: Jews, Catholics, veterans of World War II, gays, straights, women, the card-carrying members of AARP, and all those who make their living in the theater. If the jokes were old when burlesque was in its prime, the actors’ sense of timing and character shtick makes them new again.

In the spirit of the lyrics to ÒWhen You Got It, Flaunt ItÓ (which Brooks wrote for the blonde bimbo Ulla; Cady Huffman won a Tony for her work in the role), let me disclose that I have seen The Producers twice and I love it. Recording ÒThe ProducersÓ is likely to be your only shot at the show anytime soon, so don’t miss this opportunity.

Issue Date: August 9 - 16, 2001