The Producers: A Review

The Producers, Mel Brooks’s 1968 movie is about a couple of lunatics who decide to make a killing with a deliberate Broadway flop.

The film has a place of honor on most critics’ short list of best comedies ever.

Brooks turned his masterpiece into a stage musical in 2001, and it, too, became a gigantic hit.

Like the movie, the stage version of The Producers is a rude, crude, outrageous send-up of all things show-biz.

Political correctness takes a holiday in its endless torrent of stereotyped schtick that skewers everything from Nazis and gay men to the sexual fantasies of the elderly.

If a chorus of old women dancing suggestively with their walkers is your cup of tea, this is the show for you.

Manchester’s Palace Theatre, under Carl Rajotte’s obedient direction, is doing the best it can to reproduce Broadway’s version of this blowsy, sprawling enterprise.
The Producers is a big, big show, with a zillion set changes and a cast in the dozens.

William Hartery is appropriately flamboyant and amoral as Max Bialystock, the sleazy impresario at the heart of The Producers’ cockamamie scheme.

Gus Curry gamely abets the shenanigans as Leo Bloom, the neurotic accountant and partner in crime.

Jay Falzone and Christopher Noffke are so delightfully swishy as the failed Director Roger DeBris and his “common-law assistant” Carmen Ghia that you can almost see flames hovering around them.

The chorus deserves praise just for getting its costume changes right, never mind the five or six characters each of them must play.

Rajotte’s actors and crew can’t work any harder than they do at putting this monster over.

But in the end, the strain of it all is evident.

Some of the many sets are undeveloped.

Scene changes slow the production.

The Producer’s small, lively orchestra sometimes seems out of balance with the show’s singers.

Rajotte’s insistence on replicating Broadway takes a toll on the cast, too.

The chorus often struggles to keep up with his choreography.

There’s just too much of it.

The leads, Hartery and Curry, are funny and likeable, but leave the impression that they’re trying to give someone else’s performances, not their own.

In other featured roles, Dawn Lebrecht underplays the Swedish sex-bomb Ulla in a way that indicates she has no idea where this 60’s stereotype comes from.

She’s a very good singer, but her accent is so bad it can’t even function as parody.

As the playwright Franz Liebkind, Stuart Harmon looks great but acts as though he’s almost embarrassed playing a neo-nazi, an attitude that has no place whatsoever in a Mel Brooks vehicle.

The Producers plays at Manchester’s Palace Theatre through April 11.

It’s a mighty effort, but it’s trying too hard to be something it cannot be.

For NHPR News, I’m Kevin Gardner.