Last year, the Menier Chocolate Factory felt like the perfect place to revive The Producers. Mel Brooks’s gleefully bad-taste musical was a ’00s phenomenon, which sold out the massive Theatre Royal Drury Lane for the best part of two years, and did even better on Broadway. But the sheer scale of its success was never going to be repeated: the zeitgeist had long moved on.
But the bijou 180-set Menier was so small it never felt like it was trying to compete with the success of the original production. And there’s a pleasure in seeing a blockbuster scaled down. You could really feel the touches of grit and grime applied by director Patrick Marber to Brooks’s adaptation of his classic 1967 screen comedy about Max Bialystock, an amoral Broadway producer who comes up with a plan to fleece his investors by staging an appalling tasteless, surefire flop musical called Springtime for Hitler.
After sellout success at the Menier, it felt inevitable that The Producers would return to the West End. And here it is that time begins to catch up with it.
Virtually the entire Menier cast is back and on similarly good form, foremost Andy Nyman as Bialystock, a haunted little man who looks like one of Beckett’s tramps, riding his luck recklessly from day to day. It’s a very pleasurable show, that has a fundamentally funny central premise, and genuinely great songs from Brooks himself.
But even though the Garrick is on the smaller side of West End theatres, the revival inevitably loses the sense of intimacy the Menier had. Part of this is simply spectacle: the gaudy staging of Springtime for Hitler by Trevor Ashley’s monumentally tasteless director Roger De Bris looked hysterically excessive at the Menier, whereas on the larger West End stage it seems naff but less overwhelming.
Marber’s production is pointedly non-glossy, and tones down Brooks’ less PC impulses. But it’s not actually a radical reworking, and I think The Producers in 2025 probably needs that to speak to our times. Ironically, back in the ’00s, The Producers could simply function as an outrageous escapist comedy. Now, though, its talk of Nazis in New York feels too politically relevant to dismiss as a bit of provocative fluff, but too dated to actually function as contemporary social satire.
It’s brilliant at talking the piss out of actual Nazis – Harry Morrison remains a hoot as Franz Liebkind, the batshit Hitler-devotee author of Springtime. When I saw it at the Menier, just before Trump returned to power, that maybe felt like enough to give it some punch in our era of far right is resurgency.
But in 2025 The Producers’ ’60s setting leaves it feeling quaint – I’m not here to pontificate about US politics, but Brooks’ assumptions about how polite society would react to Springtime for Hitler feel rooted in a very different America.
Ultimately The Producers is a fine musical that had its moment a quarter century ago. But you’d have to be made of stone not to laugh at it, even if the laughter is a tad rueful these days.
