“The Producers” Elicits Bliss, Laughter
By James Scarborough
Published: Wednesday, February 4, 2009 11:50 AM PST To paraphrase Louis Armstrong, if you have to ask what bliss is, you don’t know.
Case in point? Mel Brooks’s musical comedy “The Producers,” directed by Steve Glaudini for Musical Theatre West at the Carpenter Performing Arts Center.
Everything about this blissful (rousing, too) production had the audience in stitches, in thrall, and in for the time of its life.
Glaudini’s direction was sharp and focused. Matthew J. Vargo’s choreography bristled with precision — especially the mirrored dance scene, where lines fashioned a rotating swastika. Ditto for Daniel Thomas’s musical direction. Ditto for Yolanda Rowell’s costumes, especially the try-to-be-kitschy outfits in the dance numbers of the musical within a musical. Never before have cultural stereotypes — steins, sausages, all things German — been costumed to such comic effect.
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Each instant of this magnificent satire resonated with brio and passion. The acting, from the leads down to the ensemble was, well, wunderbar.
The once-legendary, oh-how-the-mighty-have-fallen Broadway producer Max Bialystock (Michael Kostroff) teams up with his never-legendary accountant Leo Bloom (Larry Raben), to stage a profitable flop.
Raben’s Leo, a timid Linus-with-his-security-blanket, was the perfect foil to Kostroff’s delightfully manic and hapless Max. Raben ends up with Sarah Cornell’s exquisite girl Friday, Ulla (“When You’ve Got It, Flaunt It”), the best thing to hit America since Ursula Andress. Max ends up with the cast of “The Golden Girls.”
Watch Max and Leo’s introduction to their director Roger DeBris (David Engel), Roger’s design team (“Keep It Gay”), and Franz Liebkind (Nick Santa Maria), the faux-flop’s writer (“In Old Bavaria”), and then try to pry yourself off the floor onto your seats to watch the rest of the show.
Miraculously, the show pokes fun at show business (especially the way Max raises money for the show: nice metaphor), at show business people, at homosexuals, at Nazis past and present, at accountants, at producers, at tall, blonde Swedish women, at ambition and its step-sister, failure, at human nature, and at the fickleness of patrons without offending or at least singling out anyone.
It makes you realize that anything and anyone can’t and shouldn’t be taken too seriously. It makes you realize too that, in our current climate, perhaps the right step is the bold step, the zany step, the why not? step. It shows us that satirizing everything is a healthy way to not just let off steam (read: catharsis), but also to not take anything, much less oneself, too seriously (read: less stress).
That Musical Theatre West undertook such an enterprise in the first place was downright heroic. So too were the lavish ($$$$$) costumes and sets. The message to the burbling happy full house, at this point in time, is spot-on: if we’re going down, let the band play on. If we’re not, then let’s just face the music and dance.
Performances are at 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday, 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. The show runs until Feb. 15. Tickets are $30-$58.