There is something theroic about getting big, guilty laughs out of the most offensive subjects imaginable
“Don’t be stupid, be a smarty, come and join the Nazi party!” When Mel Brooks’s blacker-than-black comedy The Producers first exploded onto cinema screens in 1968, it was greeted with a mixture of horror and hilarity. The idea of poking fun at the Germans was hardly new — Chaplin’s The Great Dictator had done it while WWII was still taking place — but Brooks’s conceit of an over-the-hill theatrical producer and his young, naïve sidekick deliberately staging the most tasteless musical imaginable, with the intent of its flopping and their making a killing off their gullible investors in the process, managed to blaze a trail in sheer “you can’t say that!” outrage that Brooks pursued for the rest of his career in theatre and cinema alike.
There was an acclaimed, hugely successful musical adaptation of the film in 2001, which saw Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick take on the roles that Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder had so indelibly embodied on screen, and now Patrick Marber’s staging of Mel Brooks and Thomas Meehan’s book takes to the Garrick Theatre, after a successful, sold-out run in the far smaller space of the Menier Chocolate Factory last year. At a time when we all need a good, subversive laugh, this is the funniest show in London at the moment, and the most gut-bustlingly hilarious thing since Backstairs Billy: another play with a keen appreciation of camp absurdity and the comic value of old queens.
If you’ve seen the film, you’ll know the premise, and Andy Nyman’s Max Bialystock is a fine continuation of Lane and Mostel’s comic genius. Marber — who directed a fine production of Tom Stoppard’s similarly Judaeo-centric Leopoldstadt a few years ago, the polar opposite of this play — dials things down from Susan Stroman’s high-kicking, all-guns-blazing original staging, and Nyman’s wry, shrugging performance, which has more than a hint of his acclaimed Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof, makes the lecherous, vain Bialystock more appealing than he ever has been before. There were wonderful moments on opening night when Nyman-as-Bialystock sits by the side of the stage, watching the mayhem that he has unleashed unfold, and the joy on his face was a splendid demonstration of the separation between actor and character slip away.
Antolin has superb comic timing, but he is bogged down with the one element of the show that doesn’t work
He’s well supported by the matinee-idol-handsome Marc Antolin as the ever-angsty Leo Bloom (geddit?). Antolin has superb comic timing and excellent vocal range, but he is bogged down with the one element of the show that doesn’t work (and has never worked), the romantic subplot with Bialystock and Bloom’s pneumatic Swedish secretary Ulla. Joanna Woodward does what she can with the thin role, but it was notable that, on an otherwise ecstatic night of uproarious laughter, their moments and duets together were met with a considerably less favourable response than the rest of the evening’s farce.
Thankfully, they did not spoil the highlights, which are led by Trevor Ashley’s Roger DeBris, the uproariously camp director who is charged with directing the bad-taste musical, Springtime for Hitler, that the eponymous producers trust is going to ruin their careers and allow them to embezzle their investors’ cash. Ashley’s flamboyant entrance in the titular musical number is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen on stage, but the rest of his performance — including scenes set in his Manhattan residence, with what can only be described as a camp Michaelangelo’s David and a sexy Jesus — is every bit as good, and in this age of wokery and political correctness, there is something truly heroic about a production team getting big, guilty laughs out of the most offensive subjects imaginable.
Is The Producers a great Broadway musical? Probably not. In truth, Brooks’s songs are far stronger on the wordplay — “Oedipus won’t bomb if he winds up with mom ” — than they are on the tunes, and after the no-holds-barred audacity of Springtime for Hitler, the musical runs out of steam swiftly, although Marber’s staging is sufficiently savvy to run through the final scenes quickly and entertainingly. But compared to every other much-hyped musical that falls flat in Britain (The Book of Mormon, I’m thinking of you), what makes The Producers evergreen is a willingness not so much to stare into the abyss of bad taste as to leap into it, all guns blazing, and offer a fart joke in the process. If this isn’t the theatrical hit of autumn 2025, I’ll eat my (cardboard) belt.
