Springtime for Mel
Ultimate comic zings showbiz in 'The Producers'
By WENDELL BROCK for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Mel Brooks is remembering his first musical. It was Cole Porter's "Anything Goes" with Ethel Merman. He was 9 years old.

"I'll never forget all those gorgeous songs and those gorgeous lyrics — 'You're the Top' and 'All Through the Night,' " says the 77-year-old Brooks. "And I said to my Uncle Joe, who took me there, I said, 'Uncle Joe, when I grow up, that's what I want to do. I just want to write songs.' And I did. I got to write them."

But Uncle Joe probably never imagined that his Jewish nephew from Brooklyn would create a smash hit called "The Producers," in which a crafty impresario named Max Bialystock stages a musical that glorifies a gay Fuehrer.

"Don't be stupid, be a smarty, come and join the Nazi party," goes the anthem "Springtime for Hitler."

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Committing musical comedy in the first degree
'Producers' arrives at Fox for two-week run
By WENDELL BROCK for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Your honor, we the ladies and gentlemen of the jury find the defendant, Mel Brooks, guilty as charged. In creating "The Producers," he has committed musical comedy of the first degree and is to be sentenced to life on Broadway without the possibility of parole.

Three years after this verdict was handed down in the form of a record 12 Tony Awards, justice is finally being served at the Fox Theatre, where Brooks' raunchy and ridiculous showbiz sendup arrived Tuesday for a two-week run.
The good news is that the tale of Broadway con artists Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom holds up well under the rigorous hard labor of a national tour. Though Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick remain America's most wanted comedic accomplices, Lewis J. Stadlen and Alan Ruck have preserved the letter and spirit of Brooks' rip-roaring, leg-baring, politically irreverent burlesque.

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A super rehearsal diary that, in true Aussie style, doesn't pull punches.

Dreyfuss quits show
Oscar-winning blames physical demands of role after pulling out of West End comedy
By Simon Freeman for The Times


THE actor Richard Dreyfuss has pulled out of his leading role in the West End show The Producers just days before the opening night.

The 56-year-old American walked out of the £5.5 million production a week after saying in a television interview that the show was not ready to be put before an audience.

Its producers last night gave health reasons for his sudden departure.

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The Producers
Uncredited from The Times


When Mel Brooks’s musical The Producers opens in London this month, audiences will see not just the Broadway show that has won the most Tony Awards ever (12), but one of the best examples so far of a galloping trend: the movement toward fashioning stage musicals out of films. For this particular theatre version, Lee Evans and Richard Dreyfuss play the eponymous producers, inheriting the roles of the Broadway hucksters originated in the 1968 film by Gene Wilder and the late Zero Mostel.

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