Critical Essay on <i>The Producers</i>
Mel Brooks’s theatrical adaptation of his 1968 film The Producers has been an unmitigated success from the moment it arrived on Broadway, garnering a record number of Antoinette Perry Award (‘‘Tony’’) nominations and awards, and raising levels for ticket prices. There are obvious factors involved in its success, such as two big stars, solid musical performances, and terrific production values all around. What critics usually express surprise about, however, is that Brooks is able to make mass audiences warm up to the show’s more offensive elements. At the heart of the story is a one-joke premise—a campy musical gala featuring Adolph Hitler. Brooks surrounds this with moth-eaten stereotypes— sex-maddened old ladies, brainless buxom blondes, swishy homosexuals, a slavish black character and Jews, belligerent and cowardly. The satire in The Producers runs the meager gamut from offensive to irrelevant. Brooks gives audiences much to dislike, and they have responded by lining up for tickets.
No one ever said that a musical comedy has to be thoughtful or tasteful. It might even be taken for granted that the most money is to be made in pandering to the audience’s least common denominator— providing mindless entertainment that the greatest number of people can be comfortable with. The odd thing about The Producers is how it can be comforting to the audience by dealing in offensive images. In part, this might just say something about who the average theatergoer is: someone who does not find offense in unflattering portrayals of blacks, Irish, Jews, Swedes, the elderly, gays, or females. Surely none of these groups can be excluded from the droves of people racing to the play. What is missing from the play’s images is the actual offensiveness. Though the play is clearly centered on offensive characters, they are presented in a way that even the mainstream patron of musical theater would be hard pressed to find objectionable. In using sensitive cultural images without offending anyone’s sensibilities, the end product might have been bland; instead, Brooks has absorbed the energy from poor taste while throwing out its poisonous effects.
In his notes about how he came to bring The Producers to the stage, Brooks said that he wanted to do an old-fashioned musical comedy, the kind that he felt they had stopped making around 1960 (quoted in Brooks): ‘‘Unhappily, as far as I’m concerned, the musical comedy was replaced by what might be called the musical tragedy, the kind of show, often from London, in which you sit in the dark all evening without laughing once. And though you stopped smoking years ago, because you know that smoking causes cancer, you long throughout the show for a Lucky Strike.’’ With his reference to the somber contemporary blockbusters of writers such as Andrew Lloyd Webber, and Brooks’s invocation of a past that came before people knew about cancer and smoked Lucky Strikes with abandon, Brooks has identified the mandate for The Producers as light-hearted nostalgia. The whole production is steeped in the past: the Third Reich of the 1930s and 1940s, the musicals of the 1940s and 1950s, and the original film of the 1960s. According to the script, the play is set in 1959, though its sense of reality is so skewed that there is nothing particularly significant about that date (other than its relationship to Brooks’s quote about musical tragedies).
Nostalgia is particularly useful for musical comedy because its very nature is to show the world in a sanitized, rosier light than one sees when looking at the present. Audiences accept broader characterizations in nostalgic comedies, as if people were simpler in the past...
(This entire section contains 1918 words.)
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than they are in the present. The stereotype of the blonde Swedish kitten, to give one example, would be much more offensive if she were being passed off as a part of contemporary reality, as if the woman’s movement had made no progress from the 1960s to the present: since the play is set before the 1960s, both in date and in spirit, the character of Ulla can, when played by a strong performer with a good sense of self, be taken as an egotist, not a victim. Gags about Irish cops, Jewish accountants, and an African American office worker singing a Negro spiritual do not linger in the air announcing their staleness, as they did when they were more common, in the 1950s and 1960s. Instead they act as nostalgic reminders of the vaudeville tradition that Brooks, if not most of his audience, might remember.
The tone of lighthearted cornball stereotyping this production attains is centered on the two leads, Max Bialystock and Leopold Bloom. Both represent traditional Jewish stock characters. Bialystock, conniving and greedy, is a schnorrer, taking advantage of others, directly descended from Shakespeare’s Shylock, seen onstage four centuries earlier. If Bialystock is threateningly aggressive, though, Bloom is at least as infuriating in his neurotic insecurity. Bialystock is not threatening to the play’s audience because he is introduced, in the very first song, as an abject failure. Bloom, simpering into his security blanket, is drawn at least as broadly in his own way as Bialystock is. They are both character types, defining a world of even broader character types.
At the start of the second act, the play goes further toward defining what audiences should expect from its characters by creating a romance between timid Leo Bloom and Ulla, the blonde sex goddess who leaves the male characters gape-jawed. If Bloom and Ulla were at all realistic, a romance between them would not make sense: Bloom is so timid that he has a panic attack when Bialystock raises his voice, while Ulla is so self-assured that she auditions with a song called ‘‘If You Got It, Flaunt It.’’ Since they are general character types, though, their romance fits the story just fine, mostly as an indication of how producing a show has raised Bloom’s confidence. More important than what it says about Bloom, though, is what their romance does for the structure of the show: it allows Brooks to introduce a romance, an element that every musical comedy is bound to have. The focus of The Producers is not supposed to be on characters, but on the musical comedy genre.
Such a stance might seem to cheapen the value of the play, relegating it to the category of ‘‘mere entertainment’’ instead of a serious work that deserves its many awards. But focusing on the show itself, and not the characters, is what makes The Producers relevant in the modern world. It is a show about show business, making its points without dwelling on them. As the script shows Bialystock and Bloom go through the process of devising the worst show possible, Brooks, by making the characters impossible to take seriously, forces audiences to think about the show they are attending.
The Producers reflects on itself in the way that it pays homage to the musicals of the 1940s and 1950s in its tunes, choreography, characterizations, and plot. To all of the retrospective elements of the show, Brooks has added a very modern element by consciously trying to offend prevailing sensibilities. At an earlier time—say, the time when the play is set—the offense may have come from the very presence of an integrated chorus, or of openly gay characters. The world has changed, though. For modern audiences, the element of shock, though mild, derives from the ways that minorities are treated onstage. Society has come so far beyond stereotyping that even bringing out these old characterizations of the sexpot, the schnorrer, the dirty old women, and the milquetoast makes audience stop and wonder if their mere presence is offensive. In fact, none of these comic characters makes a statement about people in general, so, no, they are not actually objectionable. But they seem wrong, and that makes this musical comedy seem like it is flaunting the social rules.
The most contemporary area of offensiveness is in Brooks’s handling of its gay characters. Characters like Roger De Bris and his ‘‘common-law assistant’’ Carmen Ghia are tagged as ridiculous from the moment they are introduced, with foolish names and costumes. They have a production team of gay stereotypes clearly derived from the openly gay 1970s musical group The Village People, as well as a signature song which uses the word ‘‘gay’’ every few lines. It all seems as if they should be scandalous. In contemporary society, after all, there is no more question of equal rights for races or genders, but the legal battles over the rights of gay couples to marry and adopt keep this issue in the news. In fact, these gay characters are more likely to amuse than offend gay rights advocates. In a song like ‘‘Keep it Gay,’’ The Producers accomplishes three things simultaneously: it taps into the backwards-looking nostalgia for 1950s and 1960s attitudes; it touches on a contemporary social issue; and it shows Brook’s subtle touch, in being able to go near controversial subject matter without raising ire.
The central gag of The Producers—the sight of Adolf Hitler interpreted by a swishing, effeminate homosexual—is so obvious that it should have audiences enraged—not because Hitler is praised, but because he is so universally despised that, in mocking him, Brooks sets his sights so low. The humor relies on the contemporary notion, which is the basis of shock humor, that each person will feel that they will get the joke but that the person sitting next to them might be outraged. Aside from a very few extremists, though, there really is no group that is going to object to this play ridiculing Hitler. Except for a very few audience members who might be attending a musical comedy but have absolutely no sense of humor, there is very little danger that anyone could watch Roger De Bris’s mincing and not realize that Hitler is being mocked. At the core of this play is a scandal in theory, but one that never really materializes, hence, the play’s commercial success.
In the 1968 movie, Brooks cut between showing the debacle of the Springtime for Hitler musical onstage and showing the shocked faces of the audience members as they realized what they had stumbled into (apparently, having missed the play’s subtitle, A Gay Romp with Adolf and Eva in Berchtesgaden, when they purchased their tickets). The stage play—coming after a quarter century of what has come to be called, derisively, ‘‘political correctness’’—relies on audiences to assume that someone around them is always going to be offended by something.
Brooks’s Springtime for Hitler production number is one of the most rousing, whistle-able songs to play on a Broadway stage in years. Audiences do not have to be told that they like it. And, due to Brooks’s careful use of stereotypes, they are well aware that what they like might offend others. All that is required for this play to work is that audiences believe that Bialystock and Bloom would be blind to the play’s obvious charm. Their characters are shallow enough that it is not hard to believe anything of them: love, betrayal, male bonding, ignorance, principles or cowardice. All that matters for this to be a comedy is that people believe that Bialystock and Bloom are happy in the end and that the audience walks out of the theater happy.
Source: David Kelly, Critical Essay on The Producers, in Drama for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.
The Jew Who Buried Hitler
The cover of a recent issue of The New Yorker depicts a lone spectator scowling in the midst of a theater audience rocking with laughter. The unhappy dissenter is Adolf Hitler, and the audience, of course, is watching The Producers (St. James Theatre), Mel Brooks’s musical remake of his classic movie.
Everyone is familiar with the premise of The Producers: how the failed producer, Max Bialystock, gets the idea from his nerdy accountant, Leopold Bloom, that by over-subscribing a flop he can make more money than he could by producing a hit. Bialystock and Bloom finally discover the play ‘‘that will close on page four,’’ namely Springtime for Hitler, an epic by the neo-Nazi Franz Liebkind (Brad Oscar) designed ‘‘to show the world the true Hitler, the Hitler with a song in his heart.’’ When the play turns out to be an unexpected, if unwanted, success, Bialystock is convicted of larceny, despite his heartrending defense (‘‘I know I’m a backstabbing, despicable crook—but I had no choice. I’m a Broadway producer’’). After a few months of hesitation on a tropical isle, Bloom elects to join Bialystock in jail, though both are soon released to bring their new convict musical. Prisoner of Love, to Broadway. It is a hit—an intended hit.
Obviously there are some people—other than Hitler and his skinhead following—who would frown at The Producers. Letters to The New York Times are already charging Brooks with insensitivity to the Holocaust. Let us concede that insensitivity and bad taste are inseparable from the production; indeed, they are practically its organizing principles. Let us also concede that Brooks’s willingness to give offense is the primary reason why this event is proving so exhilarating. And the exhilaration is palpable. Never in my long theatergoing life have I been part of such an ecstatic audience. I do not mean people desperate, at $100 a throw, to applaud their expenditure. I mean a really happy audience—wreathed in smiles before, during, and after the performance.
Despite some early misgivings, I had a pretty terrific time myself. Admittedly, Nathan Lane as Max Bialystock, while unquestionably very funny, still suffers from his compulsive eagerness to please. In his second attempt to play a role originated by Zero Mostel (Pseudolus in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum was the first), Lane again shows the extent to which he lacks Mostel’s subversive ferocity, his manic marginality. In his black slouch hat and red velvet jacket, he is also much more soi-disant than the seedy Zero—no strands of hair pasted over his forehead or rolls of fat draping over his belt. And although Matthew Broderick is priceless as the nerdy Leopold Bloom, carrying his remnant of a security blanket like a lost flag, he cannot quite scale the heights of uncontrollable hysteria that made Gene Wilder such a terrified wreck in the part. The movie also had a tougher satiric edge than the show. (A younger Mel Brooks, for example, would never have tolerated the musical’s courtroom climax, with its soggy reconciliations and unconvincing character reversals.)
But the musical of The Producers is a more lighthearted creation than the movie, almost a different species, with its own special conventions and demands, for which Lane and Broderick may be more appropriate casting. What it sacrifices in savagery it gains in form, enjoying a tighter, more coherent structure than the somewhat ungainly film. Thomas Meehan, who collaborated on the book, has managed to curb some of Brooks’s excesses as a writer, and Susan Stroman, who wittily staged and brilliantly choreographed the show, has avoided some of his overkill as a director.
To be sure, excess and overkill are Brooks’s trademarks, the qualities responsible for his wildest comic flights—the epic farting scene in Blazing Saddles; the ‘‘morning after’’ in Young Frankenstein when Madeline Kahn, having been shtupped by the Frankenstein monster, wakes up warbling, ‘‘Ah, sweet mystery of life!’’ (not to mention the scene in which the monster and Dr. Frankenstein appear on stage in top hat and tails, tap-dancing to ‘‘Puttin’ on the Ritz’’); Brooks himself playing Louis XIV, surrounded by a bevy of beauties, in The History of the World, Part I, demonstrating to the movie audience why ‘‘it’s good to be the king.’’ But we have occasionally suffered the defects of these virtues in such clinkers as Life Stinks (so did the movie) and Robin Hood: Men in Tights (whose only funny element was its title). Brooks’s unwieldy sense of form may have been eliminated from the musicalized Producers, but mercifully his irrepressible good humor and his fecund imagination were preserved. The evening is virtually an hommage to this great comic artist, with dozens of quotations from his past movies. Indeed, his voice can be heard everywhere, even on stage, lip-synched by an actor singing the immortal lines: ‘‘Don’t be stupid, be a smarty / Come and join the Nazi Party.’’
Rather than look for holes in the fabric, we ought to embrace this new old-fashioned musical comedy with gratitude. It is a refreshing tonic after all those decades of moral instruction from Rodgers and Hammerstein, and urban neurosis from Stephen Sondheim, and melodious angst from ‘‘new wave’’ musicals such as Falsettos and Rent. As John Lahr has observed in his New Yorker notice, The Producers recalls the good old days of comedian-driven musicals—comedians, we should note, who were originally schooled in vaudeville and burlesque. Lahr’s father, Bert, was one of the linchpins of this movement (and his goofy, pained innocence seems to have influenced Lane’s performance in the current production). So were Bobby Clark, Jimmy Savo, Ed Wynn, and Jimmy Durante—and later Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Phil Silvers, and Zero Mostel. A number of these comics were Jews, including Lahr, though he rarely played Jews on stage. (I fondly remember him as a raffish plutocrat in The Beauty Part, explaining his state of undress to his wife: ‘‘I had to give the maid a severe dressing-down.’’)
It took Mel Brooks to tap the inexhaustible oil well of satiric deflation at the foundation of the Jewish experience. This mother lode he pumped to a fare-thee-well in the ‘‘2000 Year Old Man’’ series, playing an aging Yiddish kvetch who claims to have been a participant in all recorded history. (‘‘Did you know Joan of Arc?’’ ‘‘I went with her, dummy, I went with her!’’) The same ironic contrast between lowliness and loftiness characterizes The Producers. Take as a pictorial example the theater posters on the walls of Max Bialystock’s office—This Too Shall Pass, The Kidney Stone, The Breaking Wind, A Streetcar Named Murray, She Shtups to Conquer, Katz, High Button Jews—which deflate some of Broadway’s most sanctified commodities with outrageous Jewish humor.
Of course, Brooks was hardly the first to ridicule Hitler. In The Great Dictator, Chaplin satirized him as a pompous egotist (with a Jewish barber as his double) famously bouncing a globe of the world off his behind, when not vying with Mussolini over whose barber chair could attain greater height. Brecht turned him into a narcissistic actor in The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. Even the Three Stooges did a number on him with their crude brand of thumb-in-the-eye slapstick. Still, nobody can touch Brooks when it comes to letting the air out of evil icons (he did the same to Torquemada and the Inquisition), generally by exposing how much they have in common with showbiz. Here he turns Gauleiters and storm troopers into chorus boys, while ripping the last shred of dignity from Hitler by making him a Judy Garland wanna-be whispering ‘‘I love you’’ to the audience that he is trying to seduce.
Outraged letters to the editor notwithstanding, it is a lot easier to make fun of the Nazi movement now than it was thirty-three years ago. It would be hard to replicate today that supreme moment in the film when the audience, watching the opening number of Springtime for Hitler, is shocked into paralyzed silence before bursting into applause. For one thing, we are half a century away from the event; for another, we are too familiar with the movie. In the musical, therefore, this ‘‘gay romp with Adolf and Eva in Berchtesgaden’’ is performed before a live audience applauding it in the St. James—not so much a play-within-a-play as a hit-within-a-hit.
So the satire on Nazism is the easy part. But like Springtime for Hitler, The Producers is designed ‘‘to offend people of all races, creeds, and religions’’— not a difficult task in our present age of hypersensitivity. Theatrical gays get the worst (or the best) of it. There is a rich scene in the apartment of Roger de Bris (a stage director, not a mohel), whom Bialystock and Bloom are trying to sign for their intended flop. It includes a staircase entrance by this flaming queen in a huge wig and sequined dress, not to mention the classic ‘‘Walk this way’’ moment in which Bialystock and Bloom start swishing behind a particularly effeminate majordomo. Piling Pelion on Ossa, it also features four or five superbly funny entrances by the director’s entirely gay production team, including his ‘‘common-law assistant’’ Carmen Ghia (Roger Bart). Like other groups adept at self-satire (Jews and blacks, for example), some gays may find this kind of send-up insulting in the hands of an outsider; but it is really no different from the kind of bitchy humor gays often turn on themselves.
De Bris ends up playing Hitler after Franz Liebkind, the Nazi who wrote Springtime for Hitler, literally breaks a leg on opening night. (The musical wisely drops the outdated hippie character played in the movie by Dick Shawn.) Leibkind’s assistant tells de Bris, ‘‘You’re going out there a silly, hysterical screaming queen, and you’re coming back a passing-for-straight great big Broadway star!’’ As camped by the incomparable Gary Beach, de Bris’s first entrance as ‘‘Adolf Elizabeth Hitler’’ (‘‘descended from a long line of English Queens’’) is enough to guarantee him his Tony. Glowering at the audience with his hands guarding his crotch, he suddenly crumples his body and lifts his arm above his head like a demented teacup, displaying a gleaming set of teeth below his Hitler moustache. Radical feminists will not like this show much either, since it signals the return of woman as sex object—the long-legged, skimpily dressed showgirl sashaying in her traditional bent-kneed style. These dress parades are almost invariably used for comic purposes, as in the climactic Third Reich production number, when the female chorus descends the stairs in abbreviated Bavarian costumes, with a collection of sausages, pretzels, and German eagles on their heads. Stroman concludes the sequence with a Busby Berkeley-inspired extravaganza—even zanier than the one in the movie, involving goose-stepping storm trooper puppets against a mirrored back wall borrowed from A Chorus Line—that redefines the word, ‘‘show-stopper.’’ (She has also choreographed a dancing chorus of homing pigeons.)
Also borrowed from a more Aristophanic, less censorial theatrical period is the buxom sidekick, often a nurse, here a secretary—a Swedish beauty with a hyphenated name so long it takes a court stenographer three minutes to record it. As played by Cady Huffman, Ulla (to use the shortened form) is a willing object of Bialystock’s and Bloom’s lust, especially after arousing them with a particularly lubricious song and dance (‘‘Even though we’re sitting down, we’re giving you a standing ovation’’). It is nice to be reminded that once upon a time in the theater men and women were allowed to feel sexual attraction.
As if enough constituencies had not been offended yet, the Times has also received letters from angry people in Florida retirement homes protesting that handicapped old ladies are among those mistreated in the show. Bialystock raises capital by servicing wealthy old widows, each with her own suggestive nickname (‘‘Hold-me, Touch-me,’’ ‘‘Lick-me, Biteme,’’ ‘‘Kiss-me, Feel-me’’). As a form of fore-play, all of them propose suggestive games, to which an exhausted Bialystock replies, ‘‘Let’s play a game where there’s absolutely no sex—the Jewish princess and her husband.’’ Among a number of rousing production numbers is one, ‘‘Little Old Lady Land,’’ in which these aging women (some of them played by men) raucously perform on walkers. Only in America could it be considered offensive to depict aging women as capable of erotic and energized behavior.
The quality of performance and production is at a consistently high level. Matthew Broderick plays Bloom with hunched modesty and adenoidal shyness, performing (particularly in ‘‘I Wanna Be a Producer’’) with surprising musical comedy assurance. Despite my reservations about Nathan Lane, he has never been more disciplined than here under Stroman’s watchful direction, though I dread to think what he’ll be doing with the part three months hence. All of the other aforementioned actors, and the well-drilled ensemble that supports them, add energy and gaiety. William Ivy Long’s costumes are witty and splashy, and Robin Wagner’s sets are sumptuous recreations of a glorious Broadway past.
But the real hero of the evening is Melvin Brooks. Over the marquee of one of Bialystock’s flops is the credit: ‘‘Entire production conceived, devised, thought up and supervised by Max Bialystock.’’ Brooks, who in addition to all his other duties is one of the producers of The Producers, might claim the same credits. His music, though a decent enough approximation of Broadway show tunes, seems rather derivative, but his book and his lyrics are entirely nonpareil, and so is the animating idea behind the show. The Jew who finally buried Hitler, Mel Brooks demonstrates that comedy is not only capable of exposing stupidity and pretension. At times, it can also exorcise and nullify evil—not as powerfully, but sometimes more lastingly than a hundred Sherman tanks, a thousand B-42s, or a million GIs.
Source: Robert Brustein, ‘‘The Jew Who Buried Hitler,’’ in New Republic, May 28, 2001, p. 27.
<i>Producers</i> Pic Gains Stature as Time Goes By
New York The latest word on The Producers is that ticket orders are now on sale for the Christmas season of 2002. Mel Brooks’ Broadway adaptation of his own 1968 film has won a record-breaking slew of Tony Awards, and available seats are so hard to get that the voice mail of the show’s press representative offers this stony injunction: ‘‘Do not leave requests for house seats. Any telephone requests for house seats will not be returned.’’
Question: If The Producers is so great now, why wasn’t it so great then? Though, like Harold and Maude, it became an instant cult delight, it opened to generally dismal notices.
‘‘I wasn’t crazy about the original,’’ says Andrew Sarris, ex-film critic for the Village Voice who now reviews films for the New York Observer. ‘‘I panned it. We were still too close to the real thing’’ (Nazi Germany and the Holocaust). ‘‘Things didn’t work cinematically. It wasn’t well-made. It was more like specialized cinematic vaudeville. The bad taste wasn’t just about Hitler and gays, it was about women, too.’’
Against the Grain
Timing may have had something to do with it as well. One of the most brutal, divisive decades in American history was drawing to a close, and with it the horrible televised spectacles of assassination, burning inner cities, campus revolt and body bags flown home from the war in Vietnam. The feminist slogan ‘‘The personal is political’’ was a public mantra completely lost on cinematic down-on-hisluck producer Max Bialystock (Zero Mostel) and his timid accountant. Leopold Bloom (Gene Wilder) as they schemed to sell 25,000% of a sure-fire flop to a bunch of gullible old women ‘‘stopping off,’’ as Bialystock says, ‘‘to get a last thrill on the way to the cemetery.’’
Memory doesn’t serve that way anymore, despite The Producers’ unretouched, unexpurgated presence in cable reruns and video. Notions of taste now seem either quaint or starchy edicts of a new kind of shock troop, the P.C. police. When a female moviegoer buttonholed Brooks with the charge that The Producers stooped to vulgarity, his memorable reply, ‘‘Madam, it rises below vulgarity,’’ now seems the timely riposte, where earlier it would have been merely objectionable.
Don’t Ever Change
The Producers on Broadway has meant rediscovery of a 75-year-old figure who stands against our ideal of self-reinvention by virtue of never having changed. Not through the late ’40s and early ’50s era of writing for TV’s Your Show of Shows and The Sid Caesar Show and the later TV hit, Get Smart. Not through the classic record series The 2000 Year Old Man nor Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, Silent Movie, High Anxiety or History of the World—Part I.
‘‘Much of Brooks humor,’’ the late Kenneth Tynan observed in Show People, ‘‘. . . is inspired by fear: fear of injury, illness, sex and failure; and also of unfriendly Gentiles, especially large ones, and most particularly if they are Germans or Cossacks.’’
And in his stage review of The Producers, The New Yorker’s John Lahr celebrated comedy’s defiance of death itself by quoting, from the same Tynan essay, Brooks as a PFC in war-torn Europe in WWII:
‘‘Along the roadside, you’d see bodies wrapped up in mattress covers and stacked in a ditch, and those would be Americans, that could be me. I sang all the time . . . I never wanted to think about it . . . Death is the enemy of everyone, and even though you hate Nazis, death is more of an enemy than a German soldier.’’
Before the Rise
Before he convinced producer Joseph E. Levine that he could indeed direct The Producers, Brooks had fallen on hard times, which included divorce from his first wife, a Broadway flop called All American and a failed screenplay called Marriage Is a Dirty Rotten Fraud.
‘‘He’d dropped off the screen,’’ recalls Larry Gelbart, one of Brooks’ Sid Caesar cohorts who’d gone on to other successes. ‘‘He was out of it. No one thought he’d direct.’’ Gelbart also recalls Brooks touting a novel called Springtime for Hitler, which later became The Producers.
‘‘But all he had was a title. There was no novel.’’
What Brooks had instead was what he’s always had—a matchless talent for madcap verbal improvisation. As conceived, Leopold Bloom, one of the main characters from James Joyce’s Ulysses, was to be a tidy, dutiful, timid Jewish accountant fully prepared ‘‘to play it straight and trudge right to his grave.’’
‘Bite, kiss, take, grab . . .’
Then he runs into Max Bialystock the producer. ‘‘Bite, kiss, take, grab, lavish, urinate—whatever you can do that’s physical, he will do.’’ The two catalyze each other. Mild Leo hatches a fraudulent scheme and their lives are never the same.
Ten years passed between a writer-director’s handshake and delivery of The Producers final cut, and 32 years more before it became a Broadway smash musical. A lot of people still don’t think there’s anything funny about fascism, and grim echoes of the Holocaust are still with us. But The Producers audacious energy hasn’t dated.
Isn’t that one definition of a classic?
Source: Lawrence Christon, ‘‘Producers Pic Gains Stature as Time Goes By,’’ in Variety, September 10–16, 2001, pp. A26, A30.