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Review: The Producers

★★★★★

Five Stars

In a comedy review one can’t really mention ‘Nazi’ and ‘camp’ in the same sentence. But this is a play about camp Nazis. Sort of. Mel Brooks’s The Producers brings Hitler to the stage in an outrageous, rumbustious musical satire, a nonstop assault on good taste (perfect fare for students?). Almost everyone remembers the film of the play. I haven’t seen it, so this was my first view of Broadway razzmatazz, as interpreted by the Oxford student theatre group DEM Productions, who won acclaim in Edinburgh earlier this year with their genre-busting philosophical-legal musical A Theory of Justice: The Musical.

The action centres around two entrepreneurs, Max Bialystock, producer of serial Broadway flops, and his timid accountant Leo Bloom. They plan a lucrative scam: put on the worst play in the world and when it closes after the first night make off with the investors’ money. Following a sort of anti-X Factor talent search, they pick Springtime for Hitler: A Gay Romp with Adolf and Eva at Berchtesgaden.  Of course, the ‘actors’, not in on the scam, are playing it straight – although straight is hardly the word for the screamingly gay Roger De Bris (James Skinner) and his camp camp followers. The stage is set for a play within a play, and we the audience are ‘the audience’. (Bialystock’s last production was a musical Hamlet.) But will it be a flop or a hit? Certainly for the packed house on opening night ‘a very palpable hit’.

The two leads, totally immersed in their roles, are perfectly cast. Jack Herlihy as Bialystock has the winning deviousness of a slick-haired Fagin and the one-liners of Groucho Marx. Stephen Hyde as Bloom brings a convincing hysteria to the less exciting role. And some of the supporting performances are equally memorable. Skinner as the gay actor playing a goose-stepping Hitler, provokes roars of laughter with his posturing expressions. His equally flamboyant assistant Carmen Ghia (Alex Wickens) combines physical comedy and perfectly timed delivery.

A lot of the humour comes from ‘offstage’ out-of-character asides, as when Bialystock, half way through a Bronx aria, calls ‘intermission’ and drops his accent. Tributes to other musicals abound, from the ‘I feel pretty’ chords that accompany a flounce from Carmen Ghia, to Bialystock’s speak-singing that recalls Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady.

This is not a history play, or a historical musical. I’m not at all sure what it is except for a great night in the theatre.

Hitler, camp? But you already knew that, didn’t you.

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