The Producers review: ‘an edgy revival with a heimishe soul’

The Producers

Menier Chocolate Factory | ★★★★✩

Andy Nyman may disagree but his Max Bialystock is the culmination, climax even, of a journey that began with his David O. Selznik, the Gone With the Wind producer he played in 2007 in Ron Hutchinson’s Hollywood comedy Moonlight and Magnolias.

Back then it was the most convincing portrayal of American high-voltage Jewish aggression and anxiety I had seen from a British actor. Now here he is deploying a sweeter version of those characteristics for Mel Brooks’s greatest creation Max Bialystock, the down-at-heel New York Broadway producer whose timid and hysterical (in both senses) accountant Leo Bloom (Marc Antolin) unwittingly hits upon an idea for making money with a Broadway show, but only if it fails.

To that end, the search is on to find the worst show ever. They find it in Springtime For Hitler, a feel-good musical that pays tribute to Adolf himself with an eye-wateringly gay Führer and to the Third Reich in general with a goose-stepping chorus line.

Neither musical in this show-within-a-show has been seen in London since Nathan Lane’s Max was paired with Lee Evans’s Leo in the 2004 transfer from New York. Produced by Brooks himself that production melded Broadway spectacle with glorious bad taste, setting a standard that it was impossible to imagine being bettered or even matched by subsequent versions.

Yet this relatively compact revival directed by Patrick Marber feels more dangerous than that one. Unfurling swastikas in an American-set story today has a sharp satirical edge to it in an age when neo-Nazis are so emboldened in that country they can openly picket a stage adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank.

This version of Springtime With “you know who” as Nazi author Franz (a brilliant Harry Morrison) calls his show, also boasts a random Chasid who wanders on stage carrying a Talmud in front of the booted chorus line of Nazis who gun him down with synchronised tap dancing, one of the evening’s many uncomfortable and funny-‘cos-it’s-true moments.

Antolin, whose past roles include Marc Chagall in the playful biog-play The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk, is a sweet-natured neurotic as Leo. But I miss Evans’s version, which sweated a fear of physical harm as much he did women, especially Joanna Woodward’s Swedish siren Ulla.

Yet everything in this terrific four-star show must bow to Nyman’s five-star performance. To the qualities that defined his Selznik, Nyman adds micro-versions of Jewish gesticulation. When the thumbs on each hand touch the opposite index fingers and the wrist tilts, it combines to make a gesture as subtle as Jewish Tevya’s shrug.

There is heimishe soul underneath this Bialystock’s sweaty desperation that not only eclipses even Nathan Lane’s Tony-winning version but matches Zero Mostel’s original. And no performance of Bialystock can do better than that.