Skip to main contentSkip to navigationSkip to navigation
Sense of fun … Cory English, Jason Manford and Tiffany Graves in The Producers at Churchill theatre,
Sense of fun … Cory English, Jason Manford and Tiffany Graves in The Producers at Churchill theatre, Bromley
Sense of fun … Cory English, Jason Manford and Tiffany Graves in The Producers at Churchill theatre, Bromley

The Producers review – Jason Manford and Phill Jupitus in crass meisterwerk

This article is more than 9 years old

Churchill theatre, Bromley
Mel Brooks’s comedy about a Nazi-themed musical is revived in a charming, gleefully disrespectful steamroller of a production

Springtime for Hitler, and an Indian summer for Mel Brooks, whose 2001 musical is revived in the same week as a first UK staging of his 1961 comedy skit about a 2,000-year-old man. Then, next week, the 88-year-old makes his West End standup debut.

With comedians Phill Jupitus and Jason Manford in the cast, The Producers doesn’t disappoint. Initially, I found its glitziness and Carry On-style sexual attitudes pretty resistible: shouldn’t a mickey-taking show like this subvert rather than shore up those old styles and stereotypes? Brooks’s musical makes a play of trashing theatrical convention – sometimes very amusingly, as when Cory English’s Max Bialystock re-enacts the entire show, intermission included, in a hyperactive precis.

Phill Jupitus as Franz Liebkind

But it’s still, finally, a machine of a production, and not limber enough to capitalise when David Bedella’s Hitler moustache falls off in the show-within-a-show’s title number – which should be hilarious, but ends up slightly awkward.

But there are few other missed opportunities. Qualms are soon steamrollered by the show’s sense of fun and some high-wattage performances. English rises to the superhuman demands of a part that (as originator Nathan Lane said) “wasn’t written with a human being in mind”. Louie Spence has twinkle-toed, twinkle-everything’d fun with camp sidekick Carmen, and Bedella dazzles as a show-pony Hitler (“Heil myself!”) in a sequence that has lost none of its transgressive frisson.

If he doesn’t quite measure up to memories of fellow standup Lee Evans in the same role, Manford gives a decent account of rookie impresario Leo Bloom. Curiously for a comic, he never really involves the audience in his performance. But he’s convincingly nebbishy, a fine foil to English’s Max, and packs a strong signing voice. Contributing an outre turn as Nazi playwright Franz Liebkind, Jupitus has an accent that invades as many countries as the Wehrmacht. But that’s allowable, in a show whose gleeful disrespect is key to its enduring charm.

Until 14 March. Box office: 0844 871 7620. Then touring.

Comments (…)

Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion

Most viewed

Most viewed