Mel Brooks Produces
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Mel Brooks Produces It's Springtime for Hitler on Broadway. BY JOHN PODHORETZ Since it opened its doors in 1927, the ornate St. James Theater has been the premier venue for musicals on Broadway....
...Perhaps when the Marx Brothers exploded into stardom in 1924 with I'll Say She Is, theatergoers were convulsed to the point of pain in the same way...
...Brooks may be one of the funniest men ever to walk the earth, but there hasn't been a memorable moment in a Brooks movie since 1981, when he turned the Spanish Inquisition into a "Springtime for Hitler"-like production number in History of the World, Part I. His previous outings on Broadway, nearly four decades ago, were as the author of the librettos for two unsuccessful musicals...
...This show is the crowning achievement of Brooks's career, and there's something wistful and instructive about the cause of that achievement...
...Musicals tend to be a young man's game...
...Rotten...
...After "Springtime for Hitler" turns out to be a smash, the suffering Max Bialystock moans, "Where did I go right...
...Matthew Broderick, who plays Leo, cannot quite reach the soaring heights of Gene Wilder's flight of comic fancy...
...Until now...
...The director's starring performance as a screaming-queen Hitler in the show-within-a-show are the jala-penos hiding in this crazy salad...
...He and Bloom go into business in search of the worst show ever written and find a musical called "Springtime for Hitler...
...Broadway's second rule holds that a great musical must have a great musical score...
...James was home to the theatrical A columnist for the New York Post, John Podhoretz is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...Brooks "writes" music by humming into a tape recorder and having his melody transcribed and orchestrated by others...
...version of The Who's Tommy, the best of the rock operas...
...Her success in working with Brooks makes us long for what was lost when he became a superstar movie director and producer in the 1970s...
...She knows where all the parts fit...
...And his lyrics are wondrous and raunchy, a quality that also suffused the words of Cole Porter and Lorenz Hart in their day...
...Hitler, there was a painter...
...Have you ever seen choreography that made you dissolve into hysterics...
...Even so, you wish there were more...
...Max looks out the window of his office and sees a Rolls-Royce on the street: "That's right, baby," he shouts...
...There are others to praise, especially Nathan Lane, whose turn as Max Bialy-stock will become a part of Broadway legend in the manner of Ethel Merman's Mama Rose in Gypsy...
...The Producers cost $11 million, yet it's as light as a feather and as fleet-footed as Mercury...
...But while Brooks is at the end of his career, Stroman is only now taking off...
...From its opening to its closing curtain call, The Producers envelops its audience in an insane glee that never, ever dissipates...
...and The Pajama Game debuted at the St...
...Indeed, The Producers thrives by breaking all of Broadway's rules...
...At this sweet moment, Mel Brooks has reason to ask himself the same question...
...The third rule states: If a show's production costs rise above $10 million, it's sure to be overproduced in the manner of Andrew Lloyd Webber's monstrosities and therefore charmless...
...Where's Charley...
...was performed 2,213 times on its boards, and seven years later Rodgers and Hammerstein presented The King and I there...
...Brooks's score (which is really a collaboration with Glen Kelly, who is credited with "musical arrangements and supervision") is bright, breezy, and tuneful in a distinctly old-fashioned way...
...Not here...
...I'm wet...
...Shut up...
...This is her third Broadway production as director and choreographer in two years, and it confirms her standing as the most vital behind-the-scenes force in the American theater since the death of A Chorus Line's Michael Bennett...
...The need to breed can make a man a drone...
...Six shows running at once...
...The author of "Springtime for Hitler," Franz Liebkind ("child lover" in German), wears a combat helmet and lederhosen as he rants: "Churchill...
...I'm wearing a cardboard belt...
...The Producers has a charming but unmemorable score (save for a single song first performed thirty-three years ago), and it doesn't matter a whit...
...I was Max Bialystock, king of Broadway," the lead character laments at the beginning...
...The movie's most famous sequence may be the opening number from "Springtime for Hitler," complete with machine-gun fire and dancing stormtroopers who form a swastika a la Busby Berkeley— an orgy of intentionally bad taste the likes of which the cinema had never seen before...
...Bialystock sings of the female seniors from whom he will wrest money for his flop: "It's time for Max / To put his backers on their backs, / And thrill them with amazing acts, / Those aging nymphomaniacs...
...Whether it's murder, mayhem or rage, / Don't complain, it's a pain, keep it gay...
...The source of the laughter is a new musical called The Producers...
...How could a stage version possibly compete with all of this...
...The late Zero Mostel, who played Bialystock, was a force of nature, and he is positively elemental as the vain, leering, chiseling, eye-bulging, and oddly pathetic Max...
...There's no prevailing theory of the theater that can adequately explain this triumph...
...Gene Wilder's tantrums are so indescribably wild they won him an Oscar nomination...
...For while The Producers bills itself as "the new Mel Brooks musical," the fact is that for the first time since his "2,000-Year-Old Man" recordings with Carl Reiner, Brooks has worked in true collaboration with a talent comparable to his own...
...The dancers appear in front of a mirror on an otherwise black stage, and then twist around while the mirror rises at an angle—and yes, Stro-man has succeeded in recreating the movie's can-you-top-this image of the Nazis dancing in swastika formation...
...We must be on alert with our defenses, / For every skirt will test testosterone...
...Still, the quality that most distinguished The Producers in 1968 was its no-holds-barred gallows humor, and there's nothing shocking these days about dancing Nazis or sexually voracious senior citizens...
...Look out, here comes the master race...
...There's no sense trying to maintain critical distance: The Producers may well be the funniest show that has ever appeared on a Broadway stage...
...The Producers is the only musical I've seen whose second act is better, stronger, and funnier than its first...
...It was the first full-length feature written and directed by Mel Brooks, a crazed farce about a misbegotten Broadway impresario...
...Opening in 1943, Oklahoma...
...There isn't a hint here of contemporary pop, rock, or the portentous dissonances to which Stephen Sondheim, for example, is addicted (though the only tune that remains lodged in your head afterward is still "Springtime for Hitler...
...They engage an outrageously swishy and tasteless director-choreographer, hire an aged flower child to play Adolf, and wait happily for disaster to strike...
...She sees the whole show...
...Brooks himself has said of Stroman, "Instead of the normal Mel Brooks, who is rather vulgar, burlesquey, vaudeville, harsh, cheap, she classed me up...
...There are two exceptions to this rule, Carnival (based on Lili) and The Lion King...
...When you've got it, flaunt it...
...James, and for several years it played host to Hello, Dolly...
...He is reduced to keeping the wolves at bay by bilking old ladies out of their retirement checks in exchange for a little sex play...
...For his part, Leo Bloom fears sex: "The urge to merge can rob us of our senses...
...The movie is a treasure trove of one-liners and outrageous comic performances...
...And there's the stark fact that Brooks is almost seventy-five years old...
...The show runs ten minutes longer than it needs to simply because the actors have to remain silently in place on at least twenty occasions until the guffaws subside...
...The unimaginably inventive Stroman comes up with a routine in which Max's little old ladies do a tap number— except that it's their walkers that do the dancing...
...But never in the theater's seventy-four-year history has laughter—raucous, screaming, uncontrollable laughter—erupted from the 1,710 people sitting in the St...
...But while both have their charms, they can't hold a candle to The Producers, which does something no one would ever have thought possible: It takes an extraordinary film and turns it into an even more extraordinary piece of theater...
...Though the director and his "common-law assistant" appear in the movie, Brooks didn't have to retain them for the play...
...he has changed the plot substantially with the wise deletion of the dated hippie character who wins the role of Hitler...
...More recently, the St...
...The show's director and choreographer is Susan Stroman, and credit for the triumph of The Producers belongs equally to her...
...The movie version of The Producers was eleventh, and many would rank it higher...
...Look at me now—look at me now...
...James quite the way it is right now...
...he bellows at one point, "I'm having a rhetorical conversation...
...Last year, after polling fifteen hundred movie-industry people, the American Film Institute issued a list of the hundred best American comedies...
...But that show was a revue, not a full-fledged musical comedy that lasts almost three hours and doesn't let go of you...
...I'm hysterical and I'm wet...
...With his cigars, with his brandy, and his rotten painting...
...I'm hysterical...
...We're marching to a faster pace," the dancers sing...
...And he's not exactly a composer (though he was nominated for an Oscar in 1974 for the title song of Blazing Saddles...
...no one over sixty has ever written a good one...
...The fourth rule asserts that musicals derived from movies don't work...
...When word of a Broadway production first surfaced two years ago, it wasn't exactly reassuring to learn that Mel Brooks was writing its libretto, lyrics, and score...
...If there's anything Bialystock knows, it's how to stage a flop...
...The show's most startling number is a new song trilled by the fey director hired by Max and Leo...
...He could paint an entire apartment in one afternoon—two coats...
...It's almost painful to imagine what glories might have been created if Brooks had spent his years in the movies working with a director and strong writers who could have brought discipline and focus, as Stroman has, to his improvisatory genius...
...A meek accountant named Leo Bloom comes to do Bialy-stock's taxes and offhandedly observes that a producer could make more money from a flop than a hit as long as the show closed on opening night—because he could raise far more money than it cost and nobody would check the books afterwards...
...Truth to tell, he has never been even remotely competent at the mechanics of film...
...She manages to match the brilliance of the movie's "Springtime for Hitler" by turning the goose-stepping chorus line into a parody of A Chorus Line, the longest-running Broadway show in history...
...He envisions "German soldiers dancing through France, / Played by chorus boys in very tight pants...
...No matter what you do on the stage," sings the fey director, "Keep it light, keep it bright, keep it gay...
...Leo Bloom is prone to demented panic attacks...
...But there is something shocking about making fun of Broadway's obsession with homosexuality, and that's the subtext of "Keep It Gay...
...His movies are garish and ham-handed, the scripts (usually written by a committee of gagmen) a mishmash of lame jokes with an occasional spike of frenzied inspiration...
...he screams, and when Bialystock throws a cup of water in his face, he replies: "I'm wet...
...The first rule of musicals states: The first act is always better than the second, which loses momentum until the appearance of a rousing "11:00 Number" that brings the show back to life just before the curtain...
...Kenneth Mars's vaudeville turn has inspired a million imitators, none as good...
Vol. 6 • April 2001 • No. 31
