Friday, May 31, 2002
‘Springtime for Hitler’ - THE COMMENTARY
By Joseph Planta
VANCOUVER -- The Mel Brooks musical, The Producers, playing on Broadway now, is not only the biggest hit the theatre has seen in decades, but some have said the most ingenious. The Producers, the original 1968 movie starring Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder won an Oscar for Brooks’ writing, and became a cult hit. It wasn’t a musical per se, but it did have the riotously funny number -- dance and all -- “Springtime for Hitler.” Mel Brooks decided to musical it up, writing a score, and a book with Thomas Meehan. Meehan, late of scripting, Annie. The collaboration with the legendary comic Brooks was clever. Brooks wrote songs like “Springtime For Hitler” and “Der Guten Tag Hop-Clop”. Meehan, knew where the line would be drawn between when the actors sang and just acted.
The Producers opened to rave reviews and a boffo box office last spring. Springtime for Hitler sure, but Brooks’ smash also swept the Tony’s breaking the record once held by Hello, Dolly! Anyways, at the show’s core is the makings of a good story. See, the Zero Mostel part of Max Bialystock is played by musical theatre star of today, Nathan Lane. He’s a flamboyant down on his luck producer whose latest show was a failure called ‘Funny Boy,’ a musical version of Hamlet. Flop after flop, Bialystock is joined by hapless accountant Leo Bloom. Bloom is played by another Broadway star, Matthew Broderick. Bloom musing out loud, suggests that one could make more money with a flop than one that were a hit. Bialystock gets a brain storm and plots to stage the worst musical Broadway has ever seen -- a love letter to Adolf Hitler, “Springtime For Hitler”. They get the worst actors, worst director, and worst script, only to discover they’ve staged a satirical masterpiece. Their raising of money eventually catches up with them and so running away from the law is a given. It makes for a funny comic romp, no less.
The idea is innovational in its original form, the 1968 comedy film. However, with its musical reincarnation on Broadway last season, it reinvented the musical and gave Broadway a much needed boost. Not only is The Producers funny on a superficial level -- the gay portrayal of Hitler, insults hurled at women, gays and Blacks -- but also on a sincerely profound level. Comedy, they say, is hard, thus Brooks knows what the hell he’s doing.
About a year ago I ran across this list of allusions and references made in the musical version of The Producers. I find intellectual references in works highly interesting, like the ones someone informed me on in the hit of a few weeks ago, Spider-Man. (Amongst them: Willem Dafoe’s character named Norman, is such as seen in Hitchcock’s Psycho. Dafoe’s character bringing fruitcake to the Thanksgiving dinner... etc.) Anyways, in The Producers you see such smart references as the fact Matthew Broderick’s character is named Leo Bloom. That happens to be the name of the hero in James Joyce’s Ulysses. And on top of that, the day that the musical starts: June 16, is the day the action occurs in the Joyce work.
Mel Brooks was a television comedian, who turned to screenwriting and directing late in life. What’s amazing too is the fact that Brooks wrote all the music and lyrics to this towering classic in American theatre and satire. He’s written songs for his pictures, but never a whole score, let alone a score that now stands side by side with Herman’s Hello, Dolly! or Sondheim’s Follies or Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific.
A screen to stage musical is a tad dangerous. On The Waterfront suffered a terrible fate, as did Victor/Victoria. Sunset Boulevard too, wasn’t so hot. But Brooks’ The Producers set the bar oh so higher. Look at this year’s ailing musical version of Sweet Smell of Success. Brooks pulled it off making his show ignore political correctness and poking fun at everyone from Jews to Blacks, gays to Hitler himself. In a way it’s like any old sappy musical from the ‘50s and ‘60s. Its score sounds like the safe traditional musicals like High-Button Shoes or Bells Are Ringing. Superficially the score doesn’t look like it wants to change the world or examine what’s going on in our minds. In actuality, Brooks’ motive is to stick a dagger in the abhorrence of Hitler and what he stood for, and ridicule him.
As a musical there are a lot of parallels to the musical hits of the past. You hear some Richard Rodgers in a Brooks ballad or two. You hear big, brash musical numbers like those Jule Styne wrote, and romantic slosh like an old Cole Porter or Gershwin tune. But the lyrics are unlike anything written by the above. For example in the big production number “Springtime For Hitler” -- dancing Nazi storm troopers adorned in swastikas and all -- is the shrewd lyric: “We’re marching to a faster pace/Look out, here comes the Master Race!”
Take the campy number “Keep It Gay” which skewers gays, or the sexist song the Swedish blonde dim bulb sings, “When You Got It, Flaunt It.” In the former is the lyric: “I see German soldiers dancing through France/Played by chorus boys in very tight pants.” In the latter: “Violinists love to play an E-string,/but audiences really love a G-string.” One cannot make this stuff up, it’s that brilliant.
The Producers is biting, funny and a romp of musical theatre and clichés. It’s also profound and a satire on everyone from Black stereotypes, to the biggest, Adolf Elizabeth Hitler. According to the German nut case, and Hitler sympathiser Franz Liebkind, who writes the musical Bialystock and Bloom buy, “Not many people know it, but the Füher was descended from a long line of English queens.”
The magnificence of Brooks’ lyrical brilliance is in a trill he wrote in the song “Betrayed.” On its own “Betrayed” is a rehash of the show late in Act 2. It parallels “Rose’s Turn” from Gypsy, where Max sings: “I feel like Othello/Everything is lost,/Leo is Iago/Max is double-crossed!...” “I used to be the king,/But now I am the fool!/A captain without a ship,/A rabbi without a shul!”
The Producers, if it ever comes to a town near you, you should see. It is the touchstone of musical theatre in the past 25 years and rightfully so. For all the frivolity it is intelligent and daring. It is glamorous and glorious, and simply the best.
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An archive of Joseph Planta's previous columns can be found by clicking HERE .