Last seen in London almost 18 years ago, it’s easy to forget what a phenomenon The Producers was at the time - easily the most hyped musical of the century until the emergence of Hamilton.
Adapted from his own relatively obscure 1967 film, Brooks’s story of two unscrupulous Broadway producers who stage an appallingly bad-taste play about Hitler was the defining show of the noughties. Times have moved on, though: The Producers is less revered than it was in its day, and it’s certainly hard to imagine it returning to its gigantic former home of Theatre Royal Drury Lane.
But that’s beside the point. It’s a coup for the tiny Menier to have scored the first London revival of the show. The run is completely sold out, so it’s a hit, even if the goalposts have shifted a bit (a single show at Drury Lane has higher capacity than a whole week of performances at the Menier).
Patrick Marber has never directed a musical before, but his diverse career has prepped him well for this production, with his roots in comedy with The Day Today et al all the way up to his latterday engagement with his Judaism via Leopoldstadt and What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank.
His is a much tougher, grimier take on The Producers than the polished original production – the shabbiness of mid-twentieth century New York is virtually an extra character, and in a career-best tun, Andy Nyman’s unscrupulous protagonist Max Bialystock looks positively Dickensian in his stained waistcoat, grubby jacket and lank hair.
Licking his wounds in the aftermath of yet another flop production, Max encounters nervy young accountant Leo Bloom (Marc Antolin), who idly muses that you could make a lot of money by deliberately staging a flop show and cooking the books to make it look like you spent all the investors’ money on it (when you had in fact trousered it).
Devoid of any sense of morality, Max is thrilled at the idea, and before long he’s suckered the hesitant Leo into co-producing a surefire flop: Springtime for Hitler, an appalling apologia for the German dictator written by pigeon-fancying Nazi Franz Liebkind (Harry Morrison, glorious). With the addition of pathologically flamboyant director Roger de Bris (Trevor Ashley) at the helm, and there’s no way this thing could possibly succeed. Or could it?
It remains a very funny premise. The biggest problem with reviving The Producers – other than the sense it simply already had its day – is that social attitudes have moved on a long way since 1967 (when the film was made) and even 2001 (when the musical debuted), and a 2024 production has to reckon with various stereotypes of Jewish people, gay people, women as sex objects, plus all the Nazis.
I’d say Marber steers past them all quite deftly with his grimy, funny and well-judged production. Max certainly embodies more than a few tropes, but they’re exuberantly reclaimed by the triple whammy of Jewish writer, director and actor. Nyman’s Max is a terrible human being in many ways, but he has an irrepressibility that is ultimately very charming. Joanna Woodward’s Swedish bombshell actress Ulla is enjoyably dotty but has less of the cartoon carnality of previous incarnations. Ashley’s temperamental De Bris is so batshit that he feels less like a mockery of gay stereotypes than has been the case. It’s still a Mel Brooks show: you might be offended. But Marber injects a more sensible sensibility when it counts.
Really, it comes down to Nazis. The Producers originally ran during a period where homegrown fascism seemed like a fairly abstract concept – an era of neoconservatism and the War of Terror, during which the musical was in gleefully bad taste (remember a lot more Holocaust and Second World War survivors were around in 2001) but didn’t necessarily feel particularly topical.
Not wishing to be melodramatic about it, but fascism is a lot more visible these days and sincere pro-Hitler accounts are alarmingly easy to come across on Twitter and the like.
And actually, I think that gives Marber’s take on The Producers some edge: the magnificent sequence depicting Springtime for Hitler and its title song is a tsunami of mockery directed at the trappings of the far right, obliterating the posturing masculinity, portentous symbolism and pompous philosophising of Nazism with a hallucinatory wave of flowers, spangles, high kicks and giant silver Würste. It is incredibly funny – Springtime for Hitler itself has to be a contender for the funniest showtune ever written – but it is also merciless, a ravening, annihilating mockery.
The Producers is a bit dated, a bit slow in getting going, and is bereft of the exciting hype that fizzed and crackled through it last time. But its pillorying of fascist iconography remains hysterically funny and steely sharp – perhaps sharper than it was before.
