BACK
STAGE WEST
June
05, 2003
at
the Pantages Theatre
Slam-bang
hysterics! A showstopper every 20 minutes! More gags than you could shake a
shtick at! The rip-roaringest, rootin'-tootin'est megamusical of the season!
Sorry, got caught up for a moment in the anxious hyperbole, the over-the-top
excitability, of The Producers, Mel Brooks and Thomas Meehan's Tony-winning
adaptation of Brooks' 1968 film, which in its new L.A. incarnation comes on
like an unabashed time warp, conjuring a whole world of forgotten or
half-remembered showbiz tropes as old as vaudeville.
Or
older: When washed-up producer Max Bialystock (Jason Alexander) name-drops
Ziegfield in his opening number while a chorus of cops, nuns, usherettes, and
street people sing a hora-like ode to this erstwhile "King of
Broadway," there's an authentic sense of theatre history in play. If Fiddler
on the Roof and Rags traced Broadway showmanship back to the shtetl, The
Producers
mines a lode of Jewish American entertainment traditions so aged they almost
feel newly minted. True, there's as much chintz as gold in them hills, but The
Producers'
unselfconscious reveling--in groaner gags, razzmatazz musical numbers,
adolescent sex jokes, wide-load ethnic stereotypes--is its best feature, and at
times it's as infectious as it wants to be.
Most
times it's just a hard sell, at least in this L.A. production, under original
director/choreographer Susan Stroman. Most of the actors are pushing: Alexander,
an expert at the slow burn, instead sputters and fumes as Bialystock; he plays
the character's self-deluding, glad-handing grandiosity with an irony that
tells us such airs don't come naturally. Martin Short fares better, giving the
timorous accountant Leo Bloom a Muppet-like innocence and, in his dance
numbers, a geeky panache, though his fits and pratfalls feel forced. Angie
Schworer's one-note turn as a Swedish Amazon is pure delight for precisely the
length of her knockout audition number, less so thereafter. At least Gary
Beach--whose performance as a swishy director, Roger De Bris, suggests Jack
Buchanan in The Band Wagon--saves his thunder for the show's climactic
"Springtime for Hitler," and Fred Applegate, as a dotty neo-Nazi,
manages to build a caricature into a character turn.
The
book is as flimsy as the movie's script--the farce of deception promised by the
first act's setup never escalates--and the lyrics and score, while mostly
pedestrian, have the charm of bald simplicity. "I Wanna Be a
Producer," "We Can Do It," and "That Face" certainly
get right to the point, and musically they have a Broadway-baby obviousness
that's mostly endearing; like many of Brooks' movie songs, they sound like
fully arranged renditions of the first sing-song idea ("High
annnnnnnnXI-ety") that popped into his head and out of his mouth. If
"Springtime for Hitler" and "Prisoners of Love" stand out
from the score, it's because they showcase Brooks' gift for the dead-on
pastiche (they also happen to be the only two songs from the original film).
Stroman
matches Brooks gag for gag, first by having showgirls slither from file
cabinets in a stuffy accountants' office, then by putting a line of grannies
into a walker kick line, and finally in "Springtime for Hitler," in
which the entire cast and the designs--William Ivey Long's costumes, Peter
Kaczorowski's lighting, and Robin Wagner's sets--rise to a rarefied level of
exquisite bad taste. There's nothing else quite like "Springtime,"
probably thankfully, in Broadway history--this orgy of creepy ebullience that
loads sight gags upon ironies, camp upon kitsch--and no way to describe our
giddy, shaken reaction to it except to say that nothing that follows (or came
before, for that matter) can match it. A deeply outrageous number, it's Brooks
at his buoyantly subversive best.
If
one can't say the same about the rest of this Producers, it's nevertheless easy
to see why it's gone over so well, particularly in New York. Broadway hits
these days tend to pummel us into having a good time, and The Producers is no exception;
indeed, seldom has a show reminded me so much of the essential violence of
showbiz argot (hit, flop, blockbuster, bomb, kill, die). The key difference is
that this isn't the through-sung pop bombast of Webber or Boublil-Schonberg;
this is the old-school song-and-dance razzle-dazzle, back and bigger than ever.
The Producers puts the "broad" back in Broadway, and it's slaying 'em
nightly.
"The Producers," presented by Rocco Landesman, et al., at the Pantages Theatre, 6233 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood. Tues.-Wed. 8 p.m., Thurs. 2 & 8 p.m., Fri. 8 p.m., Sat. 2 & 8 p.m., Sun. 2 p.m. May 29-Indefinitely. $25-95. (213) 365-3500.