It’s an act of Jewish healing, to be able to laugh at Hitler,” says Andy Nyman. He would know – he’s spent much of the past 12 months milking the laughter himself. The Leicester-born actor is sitting in an empty rehearsal room for The Producers, an acclaimed revival of Mel Brooks’s daft, incisive Nazi satire that’s transferring from London’s Menier Chocolate Factory to the airier space of the Garrick in September. For his role as Max Bialystock, conniving Broadway producer and seducer of the elderly, Nyman, at 59, is drawing some of the best reviews of his career – a career that’s spanned a slew of shrewdly inhabited parts in Hollywood films (last year’s Wicked; 2019’s Garland biopic Judy), TV series (Peaky Blinders; Unforgotten) and on stage.
It has been 58 years since The Producers first scandalised audiences as an original comedy film, and 24 since it debuted as a stage musical. The story of two Broadway hucksters who contrive the worst piece of theatre imaginable – a gay musical romp through Nazi Germany, titled Springtime for Hitler – The Producers was, and is, a brazen flouting of taboos, an “act of brave, insane writing” on the part of Jewish comedy legend Brooks, says Nyman. “When you think about the demographic of people who would have seen it originally, there would have been lots of people who were either survivors of the camps, or families who had gone through World War Two,” he says. “To have given Jews fundamentally a way of laughing at what happened… is amazing.”
