Producing Low-Brow Comedy

Author: Jonathan White

Most people have a love-hate relationship with Broadway. You either look forward to a visit to the theater district next time you venture to New York, or you wouldn't be caught dead at "The Phantom of the Opera."
Yet I'd wager that Mel Brooks' current Great White Way sensation "The Producers" will appeal to those who detest the genre as much as to those who love it.
As a recent trip to the St. James Theatre proved, this is the "South Park" of Broadway shows. No stone is left unturned when it comes to lewdness and offensiveness, and if this outlandish show doesn't have you rolling in the aisles by the end of the first act, it's time you hop a plane to some staid, humorless corner of the planet like England.
The show needs little introduction. Sweeping into New York in the spring of 2001, it stripped "Hello Dolly" of her bragging rights for the most Tony Awards ever received. It proceeded to set an all-time Broadway box-office receipt record not long after its April opening that year.
Nathan Lane (remember "Aunt Albert" in "The Birdcage"?) played desperate Broadway producer Max Bialystock while Ferris Bueller himself, Matthew Broderick, was his sidekick as meager clerk-turned-show-biz icon. The show recreates Brooks' decades-old film. Those unfamiliar with the film version of "The Producers" may know Brooks as the brains behind "Blazing Saddles."
These days Brad Oscar and Steve Weber respectively inhabit Bialystock and Bloom. I have no doubt that Lane and Broderick were indelible in creating the roles. Nonetheless, Oscar succeeded, as did understudy Jamie LaVerdiere as Bloom, at turning the theater into a cauldron of laughter the evening I saw the show. What's more is that they clearly enjoyed every minute of it. Tony winners Gary Beach and Cady Huffman continue as flamboyant director Roger de Bris and gorgeous beta-blond Ulla.
The plot involves Bialystock's plan to stage the worst Broadway show ever. Judging by the posters of his old productions on the wall, including "When Cousins Marry," he is the man for the job. As he schemes, wimpy Bloom waltzes into his office dreaming of lights, showgirls and "lunch at Sardi's everyday" as a Broadway producer. Together the two enlist de Bris and dig up the most rancid book ever, "Springtime for Hitler." "Springtime for Hitler," however, proves to be a theatrical coup and launches Bialystock and Bloom to stardom. They go on to produce subsequent hits such as "Katz" and "47th Street."
On stage, "Springtime for Hitler" must be the greatest act of comic genius and excess mounted on Broadway in generations or, at least, the classiest silliness I've witnessed in the theater. As it opens, Aryan couples dance ridiculously about praising the Fuhrer and extolling the virtues of agrarian life in good ole Deutschland. These Nazi counterparts to those wholesome von Trapp children must have Rogers and Hammerstein rolling in their graves. Las Vegas-style dancers then parade down a flight of stairs dressed as bratwursts and a keg with legs. Finally an effeminate Hitler emerges singing "Heil Me!"
The show's top number smacks of tastelessness, and yet the glory of "The Producers" is that its vulgarity and offensiveness appeals with the finest Broadway razzle and dazzle. The production values are high even if the humor is decidedly low-brow.
Which brings me to another point: The show may be anathema to many in this age of political correctness. If lines like Ulla's cooing Swedish riff of "What audiences really want is a G-string" or Bialystock's "Wait till they hear about this in Argentina!" cause you discomfort, then stay away.
Like "South Park," everyone gets roasted: Jews, gays, Germans, overweight women, beloved Roosevelt and Churchill and even little old ladies. Yes, that's right. Bialystock finances "Springtime for Hitler" off his services to libidinous old ladies. Rivaling "Springtime" as the show stopper is the moment when dozens of sex-starved grandmas tap dance and somersault with their canes and walkers.
What Brooks refreshingly suggests is that we all need to relax a little, though if flaunting stereotypes distresses you, by all means, don't go near the St. James Theatre. While I initially held back on laughing at swastika-clad Bavarian chickens in "Springtime for Hitler," I think that there is something decidedly human about the show.
Only mankind, with our capacity for both goodness and evil, could ever have produced a regime as horrifying as Nazi Germany and then have the audacity to poke fun at it. This inversion of political correctness by Mel Brooks reveals, however, one of man's saving graces: an ability to laugh, and laugh heartily, no matter how tongue-in-cheek or inappropriate the subject matter.
If a rollicking two-and-a-half hours of over-the-top humor beckons, tickets to "The Producers" are more readily available these days, and you'll be supporting an industry that has taken a severe blow since Sept. 11. I'd say that "South Park" producers Trey Parker and Matt Stone have nothing on Mel Brooks and the inferno of laughs roaring from 44th Street.
You might walk away feeling guilty for laughing, but you'll be smiling from ear-to-ear with devilish satisfaction.