When Nathan Lane
came to town a ticket for The Producers was the hottest
in the West End. And when he left it wasn’t. Lane is a Great
White Way deity of course but it takes two to tango and a great
theatre star belting it out in a turkey is still belting out
a turkey. Naturally The Producers is cut from an altogether
different beast and we’ve all known it from Mel Brooks’s 1968
film. The Broadway cast now brings it to your compact disc player,
relishing an hour or so’s worth of fizz and farce, and announcing
the arrival of the production on the silver screen.
That cast is headed
by Lane, a man of Wagnerian stamina, the Lauritz Melchior of
Broadway, and a worthy inheritor of Zero Mostel’s capacious
crown. As Leo Bloom we have the superficially unlikely Matthew
Broderick – but Broderick is a versatile character actor and
a board-treader of some standing, albeit one can never quite
efface Gene Wilder in the role. He is small though – and that
helps things theatrically. Franz Liebkind is hot-to-trot Will
Ferrell, though oldsters will cleave to Kenneth Mars. Statuesque
Juno Uma Thurman, lately seen on screen slicin’ an’ dicin’ in
Tarantino martial art capers, appears as Ulla, a role taken
in the film by Lee Meredith. This Valkyrie is one we can all
admire.
From the big butch
intro through the stompy Yiddish inflected numbers the score
is a salami of chutzpah. Samba rhythms are infiltrated into
I wanna be a Producer, and a tango coils through Along
came Bialy, some G&S patter seeps into That Face,
and John Barrowman, the Anglo-American preppy star, takes
a fine Lead Tenor in Springtime for Hitler. Never was
goose-stepping more enjoyable. A sly Bolero shuffles into Springtime
for Hitler – Part II and some salsa into You’ll find
your Happiness in Rio. There’s even a bonus
track of The King of Broadway.
Above all though
it’s Brooks, words and music. And what words, ones that
tend to overshadow the music, if we’re being judgemental, which
tends to make up in gusto what it lacks in real memorability.
Still, the trick is to amuse, excite and titillate the audience
and in those spheres Brooks has few peers.
Jonathan Woolf
Max Bialystock
– Nathan Lane
