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Christmas got here early to Broadway this 12 months – and guess who they stuffed in our stocking? Adolf Hitler!” So reads a evaluate of “Springtime for Hitler”, the fictional, good-taste-obliterating musical-within-a-musical staged in direction of the top of The Producers. Christmas has come early to London’s Menier Chocolate Manufacturing unit, too, by way of a brand new revival of the Tony-winning 2001 musical (itself an adaptation of Mel Brooks’s seminal 1967 comedy movie). The Führeris again, and he’s completely bringing the home down.
The premise is easy and ingenious: two showbiz no-hopers realise they will revenue extra from a flop than a success, in order that they got down to purposely produce the worst present on Broadway. Andy Nyman is Max Bialystock, the unscrupulous hack who funds his productions by seducing randy pensioners. Marc Antolin is Leopold Bloom, the gibbering, blanket-fondling accountant who quits his workplace job to associate up with “Bialy”. The surefire dud they choose is a gooey paean to Hitler’s Third Reich, written by an ursine, helmet-wearing not-so-ex-Nazi (Harry Morrison), and directed by the explosively camp Roger de Bris (Trevor Ashley).
What’s spectacular about The Producers is simply how sharp its enamel nonetheless are, practically 60 years on. The sight of swastikas being gaily twirled across the stage nonetheless has the exhausting kick of taboo: as a satire each of fascist nationalism and showbiz, The Producers stays ever-relevant. Directed by Patrick Marber (Nearer, Leopoldstadt), this manufacturing does lots with a small, intimate stage; Lorin Latarro’s choreography is showy and dynamic – however lets the comedy rightfully hoard the main focus.
It’s exhausting to withstand incessant comparisons to the unique, so carefully does The Producers hew to it; the entire funniest strains are ripped verbatim from the 1967 screenplay. (“Hitler… there was a painter. He may paint a whole residence in a single afternoon. Two coats!”) The variations are mainly musical, the energetic and bombastic songs dotted throughout the musical’s two acts, all written by Brooks himself – an artist who at all times has one foot in vaudevillian custom.
There’s variation, too, within the casting: the sensible Nyman is way slighter than the unique Bialystock Zero Mostel (and smaller too than Nathan Lane, who performed him within the 2005 musical movie), lending a very completely different physicality to the character’s shameless, craven scheming. Antolin, in the meantime, approximates the air of Gene Wilder’s hysterical nebbish, girding it with a form of mannered precision of his personal. The supporting gamers are roundly glorious, from Morrison by means of to Joanna Woodward, who performs the preposterously accented Swedish siren Ulla.
I’m unsure something new is achieved with this manufacturing, however then, that’s at all times been the case with The Producers onstage. It by no means wanted to exist – however that doesn’t make it any much less pleasant. The jokes are speedy, the satire outrageous. How may it probably fail?
‘The Producers’ runs on the Menier Chocolate Manufacturing unit till 1 March 2025
