Summer Smash: The Producers at Ogunquit

Jason Kravitz, Stephanie Gibson, and Dan DeLuca in The Producers. (Photo: Nile Scott Studios.)

The inspired premise of Mel Brooks’s debut movie The Producers – that a veteran Broadway impresario, trying to save himself from prison for fraud by producing a sure-fire flop, lands on a stunningly offensive operetta with Hitler as its hero – has convinced buffs for six decades that the movie is a comic masterpiece. Well, it’s intermittently hilarious, but it’s a pretty crummy picture. On the other hand, the multi-Tony-Award-winning Broadway musical Brooks fashioned from it a quarter of a century ago, directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman, is a solid gold entertainment, the most thoroughly satisfying project Brooks ever worked on. He wrote the music and lyrics and collaborated with Thomas Meehan on the book. At the Ogunquit Playhouse, James Gray has replicated Stroman’s original staging and a tip-top company is giving it a splendid twenty-fifth-anniversary revival through September 26.

The difference between the 1968 film and its reinvigorated Broadway edition is a matter of style, finesse and visual imagination. The material is a hard-boiled comedy rendered in the form of a burlesque pastiche, and Stroman has built every burlesque-house gag – the producer Max Bialystock coaxing checks from ancient female investors by offering them sexual favors; the bosomy Swedish receptionist he hires; the outrageously camp director with his choreographer partner and his entourage of designers, who are every shade of gay in the rainbow – into a full-fledged musical setpiece. The title number from the show within the show, Springtime for Hitler, is a parody of a Ziegfeld Follies showgirls-on-parade special. (Costume designer William Ivey Long, whose creations have been joyously recycled by Jill E. Tarr, must have been howling with laughter as he sketched.) The musical is lush and luxe, qualities that pair neatly with the wit of its conception and the miles of choreographic invention that Stroman has layered onto Brooks’s comic scheme. Like The Drowsy Chaperone and Some Like It Hot, The Producers does what musical comedies, even delightful ones, almost never manage to achieve: it gets funnier and more deliriously enjoyable as it goes along.

One of the jokes Brooks dug out of eons of stock comedy was the one about the young man who falls for the Scandinavian doll-face Ulla but is too nervous to get her into bed, despite her encouragement. The character, named Leo Bloom after the hero of James Joyce’s Ulysses, is an accountant who quits his job and partners up with Bialystock. One of Brooks’s triumphant ideas is to turn Ulla into a true ingenue; in the musical she executes a loopy version of an Astaire-Rogers pas de deux with Bloom.

Dan DeLuca and Jason Kravitz. (Photo: Nile Scott Studios.)

Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick played Max and Leo on Broadway (though the 2005 movie adaptation by Stroman was so clunky that even they couldn’t bring it to life). At Ogunquit, Bialystock is played by the wonderful Jason Kravits, whom I loved in Chaperone and, two seasons ago, in John Turturro’s three-handed stage version of the Philip Roth novel Sabbath’s Theater. Bloom is Dan DeLuca, whom I didn’t know but who makes the character’s neuroses his own. Stephanie Gibson transforms Ulla’s innocent amorous energy into a series of beatitudes: she’s an angel of sex. John Rapson as the neo-Nazi author, whose caged birds provide a kind of chorus line behind him (one gives the Nazi salute), John Scherer as the director, and Nathan Lee Graham as the choreographer are all uproarious; the muscles in Graham’s face move so rapidly that he looks like a human marble game. And since there are so many marvelous little roles for the ensemble to slip in and out of, one of the incidental pleasures of the show is spotting actors who caught your eye in one part reappear in another. I particularly liked watching Jim Borstelmann and Steven Mooney.

– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies.