The Producers at Menier Chocolate Factory review: a superb revival of this buoyantly vulgar Broadway musical

The buoyantly vulgar Broadway musical Mel Brooks shaped from his 1967 film – Thomas Meehan helped on the book, but the songs are all vintage Brooks – is superbly retooled for the Menier’s stage by director Patrick Marber.

There’s a gloriously shabby performance from Andy Nyman as the dodgy producer Bialystok and a sweet-voiced one from Marc Antolin in the trickier role of Bloom, the man-child accountant who works out they can make more from a theatrical flop than a hit.

Lorin Latarro’s tight choreography and Scott Pask’s inventively minimal set together deserve awards for the fact that no one suffers a high-kicking jackboot in the keister.

At one point Bialystok, still revelling in past glories, shivers at the idea of going “Off-Broadway” to visit Greenwich Village. One can imagine how he’d feel about a former chocolate factory in Borough.

If anything disproves the oft-heard claim that “you can’t say anything nowadays”, it’s this show. Two Jews put on a musical by a Nazi celebrating Hitler in the hope it will bomb and they can keep investors’ money. The director Roger De Bris is a flappy gay stereotype in a frock.

The women are either pliable sex toys or erotomaniac matrons whom Bialystok seduces to defraud. The evergreen resilience of The Producers owes as much to the fact it’s an equal-opportunity offender as to its great songs and greater gags: there’s even a clutch of blarneying “Oirish” policemen thrown in near the end.

Here, Bialystok’s office is suggested by a door, a clock, a cupboard and a safe, which later does duty as an exit and a prison cell. The man himself is unshaven and unkempt in ill-fitting, extravagantly stained finery. Vocally, Nyman switches between hoarse speak-singing and full-volume belting, in a way that gives concern for his voice.

(Manuel Harlan)

Antolin does some great physical clowning as the hysterical Bloom but I don’t think I’ve ever seen an actor who’s entirely convinced in the role, including Gene Wilder in the original film. (Susan Stroman’s 2005 attempt to reverse-engineer the musical for a screen remake is one of the few times The Producers has misfired: the stage version was even a hit in Berlin in 2009.)

Anyway, Marber’s fluent production has gorgeous, overblown supporting performances from Joanna Woodward as bosomy Swedish secretary/showgirl Ulla, Trevor Ashley as a twitchy De Bris and Harry Morrison as the Luger-toting playwright Franz Liebkind, fiercely defending his idol (“the Fuhrer was BUTCH!”).

The incidental detail is wonderful: the Zimmer-frame chorus line of Bialystok’s conquests is balanced by a Fiddler-style onslaught of capering shtetl inhabitants earlier on. Some throwaway lines are built up into full-scale Vaudevillian “bits”.

Paul Farnsworth’s costumes, including hotpants and giant spangled Bratwurst and Bier-stein headgear for the dancers, Swastika-clad pigeons and a living statue with outsized genitalia, are hilarious.

The sound was slightly askew on opening night: the line recorded by Brooks himself and given to a capering Brownshirt in every production (“don’t be stupid be a smartie, come and join the Nazi party”) got lost. Shame: the fact that Brooks, at 98, is still with us and still overseeing new reinventions of The Producers is something to shout about.

Menier Chocolate Factory, to March 1; menierchocolatefactory.com