The Producers, “If you’ve got it flaunt it!”

How would a Broadway production engage the production and consumption of film, theatre, and the imagination in general?

Well, you could make a play of a film about the making of a play that is designed to be so bad that it flops (in order to make lots of money!) You could make musical theatre version of the classic Mel Brooks, The Producers! Of course, the show was a hit, despite ironically stereotyping major groups from Jews, women, gays and, yes, even Nazi sympathizers.

Of course that is the premise of Profile > The Producers” href=”http://www.toronto.com/profile/669479/”>toronto.com > Profile >The Producers: if you make a musical that tries to offend everyone you end up with an ironic hit. The irony of irony. The Producers proves some neon-baroque point about how mockery taken too far becomes modern fun.

Some of the points worth mentioning about this are:

1. The play both mimics the film while also commenting on it. I love when the mirror behind the dancing Nazis tilts to show their dance as a spinning swastika – this moment reflects on the same visual moment in the film where a shot from above shows a spinning swastica of dancers. Of course, in the film, the shot was one that showed something that couldn’t be seen by a theatrical audience (who can’t float over the stage), but the Broadway version does just that – the impossible – with mirrors.

2. In the show there are breaks from the illusion where the actors talk to us, the audience, like the extended monologue at the end when Max is in prison, the lights change, and he talks to us about what we might have said during the intermission. This continues the complex theme of how the audience recieves performed events – which is at the narrative centre – how to make sure they will hate a musical so that it flops. One way is to joke about how it is recieved – let us in and make fun of our gossip in a deprecating way.

3. Was the moment with the hat (crown) between Max and Leo a stumble or a deliberate pretend stumble. (The night I saw the show in Toronto there was a moment where it seemed Max started laughing at a mix up with a crown/hat prop and couldn’t quite say his lines right. The two paused, controlled themselves as if themselves amused by the vagaries of live performance.) The beauty of the work is that this could have been scripted or not. In fact in the prison monologue Max mentions it. (Was that in the script?)

4. How do performances offend? Why is the Nazi musical within a show not offensive? Was Mel Brooks daring us to be offended? Does satire bend the offense? When does such mock-offensive material slip into just poor taste?

5. The Ulla character harnesses harmless erotica while mocking it. We can say about performance as Max says about shapely beauty:

“If you’ve got it flaunt it!”