The Producers
Reviewed by Deborah Klugman
Celebration Theater
Extended through August 26
I’ve always admired Celebration Theatre for its expert staging of technically demanding plays in tiny venues. The company’s musical productions — last year’s Cabaret, The Boy from Oz (2016) and Women of Brewster Place, the Musical (2010) — have been especially impressive.
Now comes The Producers, Mel Brooks’s wacky stereotype-laden show about an unethical Broadway producer and his unconventional effort to score big bucks by producing a musical romp about Adolf Hitler. Directed by Michael Matthews (who also directed Cabaret and Brewster Place), it features the same technical excellence as these prior musicals and is unquestionably entertaining. But several of the lead performances are off the mark, and the result is a good production that could have been better.
Set in 1959, Brooks’s comedy brainchild debuted as a 1967 film featuring Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder before its adaptation for Broadway in 2001. The stage version — music and lyrics by Brooks and book by Brooks and Thomas Meehan — was directed by Susan Stroman and featured Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick (both of whom also starred in the 2005 film). The show won 12 Tony Awards, including best lead actor for Lane and best musical score for Brooks — remarkably, his first Broadway musical effort at age 74.
These awards were bestowed despite critics who challenged Brooks for his boilerplate images of, well, just about everybody: swishy gays, buxom blondes, greedy Jews, sex-mad senior women, you name it. Other cultural pundits argued that the stereotyping in Brooks’s material is so ubiquitous and outrageous that it serves as a corrective to the real deal, provoking audience members to reconsider their own ingrained prejudices. And I think that still holds true.
In this Celebration production, Richardson Jones plays Max Bialystock, a formerly hotshot theatrical producer who’s fallen on hard times after he produces a musical called Funny Boy that bombs big time. The flamboyant Bialystock hires a neurotic young accountant, Leo Bloom (Christopher Jewell Valentin), who figures out that there’s more money to be made with a Broadway flop than with a hit. So, the pair decides to aim low and, after combing through an untold number of scripts, settle on a godawful and politically offensive musical, Springtime for Hitler, utterly convinced that it’s a surefire debacle. Unfortunately, their production is a hit, its notoriety ensuring that their methods of finance (loving up and bamboozling little old ladies) will be spotlighted, and their plans for embezzlement discovered.
The vital and vibrant elements of the production are on display from the start; they include an exuberant dance ensemble (terrific choreography by Janet Rosten), who casts naughty come-hither glances while tapping and twirling about the stage, and E.B. Brooks’s fabulous costumes that reach their peak of ludicrous humor later in the play-within-a-play celebration of kitschy “German” culture (dancers adorned with sausages, pretzels or Teutonic horns). Lit by Matthew Brian Denman, Stephen Gifford’s set serves as Bialystock’s musty office digs, only to be convincingly transformed into a stage for a variety of spectacles. Cricket S. Myers’s sound punches up the comedy, while a live four-person band, with musical director Anthony Zediker on keyboard, furnishes a dynamite baseline for the show’s dynamic song-and-dance.
Amidst all these pluses there emerges a central misfire: the casting of the handsome, youthful-looking Jones in the role of an overweight, over-the-hill Jewish conniver. It’s an awkward fit at best, and despite his smooth delivery and resonant vocals, the hard-working Jones registers as wrong for the part, never managing to encapsulate Brooks’s Bronx-born humor that is the show’s trademark. Two other misses are Valentin’s blueprint performance as Bloom, Bialystock’s blanket-clutching partner and timid foil, and Mary Ann Welshans as their voluptuous administrative assistant. Both are thin portrayals that serve the storyline and offer not much more.
The best performances come from among the supporting ensemble: a flawlessly calibrated Andrew Diego as the swishing, simpering secretary/lover of Springtime for Hitler’s inept director (Michael A. Shepperd), and John Collela, in a cameo as a nasty capitalist, and in the more substantial role of the lunatic playwright and fan of Hitler who’s written the script that propels Bialystock and Bloom to their damning success. Evan Borboa scores in a variety of small parts, while the topnotch chorus of dancers (Jasmine Ejan, Angeline Mirenda, Sarah Mullis and Brittany Bentley) spread their joy freely to a smiling, appreciative audience.
Celebration Theatre, 6760 Lexington Ave., Hollywood; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m.; Mon., 8 p.m.; Thurs., 8/8, 8 p.m.; extended through Aug. 26. (323) 957-1884 or www.celebrationtheatre.com. Running time: approximately two hours with an intermission.
