The Producers, Menier Chocolate Factory review - liberating taboo-busting fun for grown-ups

There is something deliciously perfect about the timing of The Producers’ arrival at the Menier Chocolate Factory. In these twitchy times, Mel Brooks’s scurrilous Hitler musical lands like a stinkbomb in a parfumerie.

Swastikas are everywhere, even on the backs of pigeons; there’s a man dressed as Jesus serving a tray of champagne, a bearded Hasidic dancer brandishing a prayer roll who wafts in and out of the routines, geriatric humping and prolific swearing; even Michelangelo’s David turns up, created by a dancer in a white bodysuit and wig, his “marble” tackle prominently to the fore. If you like to take offence easily, this is the show for you.

The rest of us will be relishing the strains of “Springtime for Hitler”, “Der Guten Tag Hop-Clop” and a clever score that has room for a sliver of Wagner’s Siegfried. It’s a rarity, a clever, genuinely funny musical with great songs and a novel premise: how to stage the world’s worst musical, close it speedily and run off with the backers’ cash? It’s so refreshing to hear its witty repartee and inventive rhymes. Where else can you hear lines like the one Max Bialystock (Andy Nyman) reads out from a review of his flop Hamlet musical, Funny Boy: “What he did to Shakespeare, Booth did to Lincoln”, where the paired rhyme is “stinkin’”?

This is a gloriously silly backhanded tribute to Broadway’s ecology, from its doggedly, um, enterprising producers to its fickle audiences and its egotistical creatives, especially “the world’s worst director”, Roger De Bris (Trevor Ashley), and his gay entourage in monogrammed tops. 

The little Menier has somehow shoehorned this spectacular into its limited playing space, tricked out here as a big Broadway venue with red velvet curtains, swirling follow-spots and posters outside. Max’s office is created inside it with just a door with his name on it, a giant safe that doubles as all manner of furniture and, of course, a casting couch. At the rear are handy jungle-gym bars the cast can hang from and even dance on. 

Yet in this space the dance numbers are still sensational, Lorin Latarro’s choreography as witty as the dialogue. Just feet away from the front row, dancers fly excitingly past, whether dressed as shtetl dwellers, accountants or old ladies with Zimmer frames in leopardskin coats. There’s no room in this production, sadly, for a stormtroopers’ dance in swastika formation when the work is finally staged, but instead there are inspired touches like the Hitler salutes that suddenly become camp by the simple means of bending the raised hand at the wrist in an ooh-you-are-awful flap. 

To make this irreverence fly, big stage personalities are needed, and this show has a half-dozen of them, not least its director, Patrick Marber, who gives the piece a contemporary heft. Marber passed his ow-dition, as Max’s Swedish Secretary Slash Receptionist, Ulla (Joanna Woodward, pictured left), would say, summoned by Brooks to be vetted before he was hired to direct; he has done him proud. 

Andy Nyman is the dynamo of the show, a convincing wheeler-dealer, but hard up now, his hair greasy, his suit shoddy. He gives Max the nuanced characterisation he is so adept at. This Max is avuncular and likeable in a Delboy-ish way, one of life’s battlers and a heroic shtupper of old ladies with fat chequebooks; he has a rogue’s gallery of their massed portraits in a closet and is careful to take out the one of the lady he is entertaining and put it on display. 

HIs Leo Bloom, Marc Antolin, is spot on too, nervous and silly, but equally amiable. As Max notes, in one of the production’s typical meta-moments, Antolin is a good singer with a breezy but strong tenor, and an adroit hoofer as well. As his loved one, Ulla, Joanne Woodward is sweetly Marilyn Monroe-sexy and deadpan eccentric. “Ulla belt now,” she announces, and she certainly does, but she can also deliver Brooks’s double-edged humour, which is aimed both at the characters and the genre they are working in. She turns the unlikely line to Leo, “Why Bloom go so far down stage right?” into a zinger.

The show also needs key personnel who go way over the top, and it has a formidable pair of them. Playing Franz Liebkind, the delusional writer of Springtime for Hitler – who claims to have done a stint at Berchtesgaden taking the Führer his bedtime hot milk and opium – is Harry Morrison, pictured above right, a man of considerable girth, kitted out in skimpy lederhosen and a Wehrmacht tin helmet. When he sings “Have You Ever Heard the German Band?” there’s a weird beauty to it, mixed in with its oompah insidiousness. 

Equalling him in the roly-poly stakes is the Australian musicals star Trevor Ashley (pictured right with Raj Ghatak), who takes Roger De Bris to new levels of camp craziness. And heading his posse he has Raj Ghatak as Carmen Ghia, the little to his large, a slender streak of acid. The scene where De Bris makes his grand entrance in a gold chariot as Adolf Elizabeth Hitler, after Liebkind dutifully breaks a leg, is screamingly funny. Even his slicked down wig with trademark fringe is funny.

Ultimately, this is an uproarious adult panto in which taboos are liberatingly busted, the quips and asides are treasurable and even a row of accountants with adding machines becomes a great comic turn. I have always wanted to see the next musical Bialystock and Bloom are brewing up – in Sing Sing, where else? – with the working title Prisoners of Love.

• The Producers at Menier Chocolate Factory until 1 March 2025
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