 |
| 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.