The Producers - Review

Menier Chocolate Factory, London

****

Music and lyrics by Mel Brooks
Book by Mel Brooks and Thomas Meehan

Directed by Patrick Marber

Andy Nyman and Marc Antolin

The Producers that has just opened at the Menier Chocolate Factory has sold out for the entirety of its 14-week run before one review has even been published! Patrick Marber directs and his helming of this revival of Mel Brooks’ comic gem, is impeccable. As musicals go The Producers is massive and to have been able to have crammed it into the Menier’s intimacy is quite an achievement. Designer Scott Pask has used the venue’s size to bring us closer to the chemistry of the relationship between scheming Broadway producer Max Bialystock and his apparently timid accountant Leo Bloom.

The show’s plot famously centres around Bialystock and Bloom’s need to create a surefire flop, so as to avoid having to pay out any returns to Bialystock’s “little old lady” angels who he has seduced and defrauded by overselling the profits of his next show many times over. The pair stumble across Franz Liebkind, a Nazi playwright whose Springtime For Hitler they seize upon as a show in the worst possible taste and guaranteed to bomb at the box office. Of course, through an over-plastering of camp and kitsch, the musical goes on to become a Broadway smash and the pair are exposed as scheming crooks.

The accomplished Andy Nyman (who played Tevye at the Menier six years ago) is Bialystock with Marc Antolin playing Bloom. Nyman masters Bialystock’s New York Jewish shtick, getting under the skin of the man’s chutzpah and irreverence. Bialystock however needs to bestride his scenes like a colossus and there is something just a touch diminutive in Nyman’s turn. His take on the monstrous producer is unlikely to be remembered as one of the greats.

It is Marber’s supporting characters, from the show-within-a-show, who really bring this production to life. Playing Broadway director Roger De Bris is Trevor Ashley who gives possibly the finest interpretation ever to this larger than life character. Equally Harry Morrison's Franz Liebkind is a treat. Joanna Woodward gamely steps up to the role of Swedish blonde Ulla, hired as the producers’ assistant and she too delivers a performance that is as fabulous as her stunning looks.

Marber’s ensemble are close to flawless with Lorin Latarro’s choreography proving to be a work of genius within the Menier’s confines. Matthew Samer’s musical direction is also a delight.

Winter may be upon us but there's no room for snowflakes at The Producers. Aside from its two protagonists who end up in Sing Sing, this is a show that takes no prisoners. And as Mel Brooks mercilessly mocks a slew of minorities, the evening makes for one big guilty pleasure. 

Runs until March 1st 2025

Photo credit: Manuel Harlan

Titus Andronicus - Review

Wanamaker Playhouse, London

*

Written by William Shakespeare

Directed by Jude Christian

Katy Stephens and Kibong Tanji

Mel Brooks’ The Producers opens with Max Bialystok, King of the Broadway flop, reading the dismal reviews of his latest show Funny Boy, a musical take on Shakespeare’s most famous tragedy, Hamlet.  As the lights went down for the opening of Titus Andronicus and the cast burst into song, for a moment one may have feared that the evening was likely to be a reprisal of Bialystok’s Funny Boy. Sadly, those fears were confirmed. All that was missing from the confected balladry was the all-female cast singing All The Nice Girls Love A Candle.

Titus Andronicus was Shakespeare’s first tragedy and his most viciously violent play. Done well, it can blend horror, humour and pathos into an evening of troubling yet moving entertainment. Jude Christian’s production however at the Wanamaker Playhouse (that theatre’s first Titus) is a pretentious attempt to sanitise the fabled gore, replacing blood and injuries with dumbed-down interpretation and chopped-up candles, playing for laughs at times when none are required and reducing the Bard’s brilliance to banality.

The now standard trigger-warning in the programme warns of the vast array of troubling themes in the play. The warning however fails to mention the extreme boredom and confusion that await the audience once the lights go down and the Wanamaker Playhouse’s famed candelabras descend...

Titus Andronicus is a play that demands the audience be shocked as a part of its structure. Typically this involves classy stagecraft, brilliant acting and, frequently, litres of stage blood, all combining to create the illusion of horrific human suffering. In Christian’s production the stagecraft is childish and trite, where rather than suspending our disbelief at the ghastliness we are supposed to be witnessing, Christian abuses it. The actors may be working hard on stage, but their direction has been lazy.

The classically trained Katy Stephens (reviewed as Tamora at Stratford on Avon in 2013) actually makes a decent fist of Titus and she’s matched by the similarly talented Kibong Tanji as Aaron the malevolent Moor. But that's it. 

There is virtually nothing to redeem this take on Titus Andronicus, and compared to Lucy Bailey’s magnificent version of the play that last graced the neighbouring Globe's stage in 2014, it is hard to believe these two productions emanated from the same company. The Globe fail to promote the author of the lyrics that bookend the show’s two halves, which is hardly a surprise - the lyricist should be ashamed of them.

Bloody awful!

Runs until 15th April

Photo credit: Camilla Greenwell

King Lear - Review

Shakespeare's Globe

***

Written by William Shakespeare

Directed by Helena Kaut-Howson

Kathryn Hunter and Michelle Terry

Returning to the title role after 25 years (and back then in a production also directed by Helena Kaut-Howson), Kathryn Hunter leads in King Lear at Shakespeare’s Globe. That she is a woman in a man’s role, proves to be of little impediment to her delivery, and there is an authenticity to her take on the aged, dementia-raddled monarch that works well. The flaw in Hunter’s performance turns out to be not her sex, but rather her ability to master Shakespeare’s verse. Some of Lear’s words are amongst the most profound in the canon yet especially in the evening’s first half, Hunter races through her speeches offering two-dimensional deliveries too often rather than thoughtful interpretations of the prose. There is an Alf Garnett / Mel Brooks-like mania to her Lear that sees her play the role unnecessarily, inappropriately (and quite possibly, unintentionally) for laughs. And her howls at the death of Cordelia, surely one of the most gut-wrenching moments ever penned, lack pathos.  

Michelle Terry, the venue’s artistic director lands herself the curious casting combination of Cordelia and the Fool. To her credit, she makes a decent job of both, even if Kaut-Howson has decided the Fool’s departure from the story should be elevated to a moment of melodramatic death. Other than Lear’s penultimate lament that his “poor fool is hanged”, or reasons of economy, there is little to justify the fusion of these two roles into the same performer.

Some of the acting is fine and gripping. Ryan Donaldson as Edmund, Marianne Oldham’s Reagan and especially Diego Matamoros as Gloucester turn in fine performances. Matamoros in particular is deeply moving after his blinding. Elsewhere however there is under-performance and, too often, tedium. At 200 minutes including interval, weak performances make the narrative drag, and that's even without the addition of a great stage of fools as the entire cast rise from the dead to give an unnecessary post-finale display of country dancing.

Kaut-Howson was sadly caught up in a car accident that kept her away from the play’s final two weeks of rehearsals. Whether this absence contributed to the production’s lack of lustre one may never know, but this is not one of London's great King Lears.

Runs until 24th July

Photo credit: Johan Persson

Shuler Hensley - An Outstanding Actor Who Brings Humanity To Dysfunctionality

Shuler Hensley in The Whale

Shuler Hensley is an American actor who, outside of the theatre world and especially the musical theatre world, is little known in the UK. 

Currently he can currently be found in the Theatre Royal Bath’s Ustinov Studio in the modern tragedy The Whale, in which he plays the morbidly obese Charlie, an Idaho man who is close to death. Critics have raved about the play (my own review is here), but The Whale is only the most recent of Hensley’s achievements on these shores. 

Twenty years ago (and the only American playing in that South Bank cast) he won the Best Supporting Actor Olivier Award for his portrayal of Jud in Trevor Nunn’s Oklahoma! at the National Theatre. That production was one of the few American shows ever to have enjoyed a fresh UK revival that itself was then shipped back across the Atlantic to become a hit in New York too. On Broadway in 2002, reprising the National Theatre production, Hensley’s Jud earned him not only that year’s Drama Desk Award and Outer Critics’ Award, he scooped the Tony too! For those of us lucky enough to have seen the show (I was one) Hensley’s work was unforgettable. 

Nunn's Oklahoma! was choreographed by Susan Stroman – who went on to work closely with Mel Brooks in transferring his Young Frankenstein from a hit comedy movie onto the stage. Stroman didn’t hesitate in proposing Hensley to create The Monster when the show opened on Broadway in 2007. Ten years later Brooks and Stroman brought the show to London, where Hensley was again the only American actor employed, going on to magnificently (and far from monstrously) recreate his Monster for the West End. 

After The Whale's opening night in Bath last week I caught up with Hensley to learn a little more about him and his career.

JB:    Jud, The Monster, and now Charlie. What draws you to playing such dysfunctional individuals? 

Shuler:    That's a very interesting question. I think as a character/actor, I guess I'm just drawn to characters who we (by which I mean the general public or society) think we know based on our initial impression. Usually it's a visual impression. He's the dirty farm hand. Or he's the morbidly obese guy who can't get out of his apartment. It could be anything. Then , understanding that, and sort of as an actor, just trying to figure it all out. People don't go into life wanting to be labelled. I think we want to fit in. We want to be a part of everyone else's journey.  

That's the interesting thing about these characters - finding something that I think we all can recognise in a person, and then sort of flip it and say, "Well, wait a minute. Actually, I can relate to that." 

And once you're able to do that with an audience, and you're able to take a stereotypical character and make people start questioning that, then I think it's really powerful and interesting for the viewer to say, "Wow. Maybe there is some worthiness to these people."  

I mean, I play a lot of villains. I play a lot of darker characters. But with my research and with my knowledge of these people, in reality I have found that these dark souls don’t thinks of themselves as psychopaths or a villains. They often think, "Well, I'm right and everyone else is wrong, so it's not like I'm evil." And once you can figure that out then you can really portray someone who is deeply believing in what they're saying. Does that make sense? 

JB:    It makes perfect sense. In The Whale, where you have to endure a particularly spiteful daughter – there is a moment when you, her scorned and obese father, realise the good that lies within her. It’s a heartbreaking, powerful moment that you perform beautifully.  

Moving on, what sympathy do you think we can or should feel for Jud in Oklahoma!? 

Shuler Hensley's Jud Fry

Shuler:    Well, Jud's an interesting character. When Oklahoma! first came out especially the film, I think there was a necessity to draw a line between who's good and who's bad. But what I find fascinating about Rodgers and Hammerstein is that actually they don't write that way. 

If you look at things like South Pacific and you look at Oklahoma!, there's a lot of good and bad in everyone. And Curly, although he may be all fluffed up in the movie, he's got a dark side. He's got a very vengeful side. In the song Lonely Room for Jud, which incredibly was cut from the movie, that's a vitally important moment to get inside Jud’s head.  

Listen to the lyrics of Lonely Room - it's a love poem. It's a wanting to belong. It's a wanting to get a bride and fit in, and be loved, and to love someone. I mean, we all can relate to that, but what's interesting about Richard Rodgers' music is that underneath that love poem is dissonance. 

I talked to Mary Rodgers about this, his daughter before she passed, and she said that he considered Lonely Room to be one of his greatest compositions ever because it so well contained the emotion in what's happening within the song. Jud is a perfect example of somebody who doesn't think of themselves as being a villain, but for whatever reason has been put into that situation and is defensive. 

Think of “Poor Jud Is Daid”. If you take that out of being a comedic duet and saw what Curly was doing, he’s being horrible to Jud. 

JB:    It's horrendous bullying. 

Shuler:    Quite. People laugh and scoff in that song, but if you can create moments where the audience - and I mean Oklahoma! is the quintessential American musical – if you can get them to hear a song for the first time in a way that makes them start to question their judgement, THAT is what live theatre is all about. 

I've worked with Hugh Jackman (who played Curly in the Nunn production). That was his first thing here. I've worked on films and movies and people like Hugh and a lot of these guys like Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart who've made success in movies and TV come back to theatre. 

And the reason is that you can't re-create a live audience or a live experience because you're in it with the audience. And so when you create a touching moment for a villain like Jud or a touching moment for a morbidly obese gay man like Charlie, there's a palpable connection with the audience in a live environment that can't be re-created. 

JB:    You just mentioned Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart. You recently played alongside them in the Broadway production of No Man's Land. Tell me about working with those two theatrical knights, on Pinter.   

Shuler:    It reminds me of like a Sunday Times crossword puzzle. It's very cerebral on the surface, but if you go along with that then you realise that there's a lot of stuff going on that's beyond the words or underneath the words, or between the lines. And that's what was so fascinating with it. We actually worked with the neurologist Oliver Sacks who Patrick invited into to our rehearsal process.  

He helped us with the fascinating aspect of the whole play being about false memory. I think we all have it. I mean, if you have a sibling, you can both remember in great detail sometimes different versions of the same event. Both versions cannot be true because they don't line up. It's just a fascinating journey in false memory with Pinter dialogue. 

JB:    Let's move on to Mel Brooks and Young Frankenstein.

Hensley as The Monster

Shuler:    Well, where to begin? I consider Mel Brooks to be a dear friend of mine. I talk to him on a regular basis. He's nearly 92 and he couldn't be a younger soul. I think it's the throwback to when he started as a comedy writer to Sid Caesar's show of shows. I believe that's what it's called. In the writing room was Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, a very young Woody Allen. Those types of guys who had to come up with a weekly comedy line – No, I think Mel said there were about 70 shows a year. 

The idea of coming up with something funny and throwing it like a spaghetti, throwing it against the wall and seeing if it sticks. That's Mel's mentality with everything. He didn't want to re-create the movie. He wanted it the musical of Young Frankenstein to be an original experience even though everyone can relate to the lines and the scenes that everyone remembers from the film.  

Having him say that from the beginning was such a relief because I didn't want to try to create or re-create the version of The Monster from the film because there's just no way to do that. 

We had the Broadway run and then I did it on tour because I wanted to experience what that was like for the American audience, which was amazing because everyone loves Mel Brooks.

So after 10 years probably Mel just called me up. I talked to him occasionally within that gap, and he kept saying, "Shuler, I'm getting this to London. I'm telling you. It's going to go to London." And Susan Stroman and I would laugh about it because I've worked with Susan Stroman on a number of projects and we do readings. I'd say to Susan, "Have you heard from Mel?" And she's like, "Oh yeah." And lo and behold, he got it here.  

I said, "I'm going to do it. I'll do whatever you want me to do."

And then when we got here, he came in and completely re-designed it, re-thought it, let a lot of the leads and people experiment with lines. He was here for five, six weeks. I mean, he's very hands on, and super energised. I can't even begin to tell you how amazing that man is, and he's constantly thinking. 

JB:    The Whale – tell me about your journey with this astonishing piece.

Shuler Hensley and Ruth Gemmell in The Whale

Shuler:    It started six years ago. They had a reading of this play called The Whale and they said, "We'd be interested in Shuler reading this." So, they sent me a copy of it, and when I read it my jaw dropped. I just felt such a connection to not only the characters, but the style of writing and the rhythm of the writing, and the use of pauses and things not said that should be. It was all contained within the script. That was just reading it. 

And then you get to the actual table read. A lot of times the things you think are going to happen just don't, but pretty much everything that I was hoping for just naturally happened within the table read. I think we all went away from that thinking, "This is something really amazing to be a part of." 

And then the writer, Sam Hunter, is just one of those people that's just an old soul and a wonderful human being. He sets all his plays in Idaho, which is where he's from. And it's sort of autobiographical in some aspects, but in others it's hints of people he knows and has entered his life. The storyline of Mormonism reflects how prolific that creed is that part of the country.  

Idaho’s up in the north west corner. It's sort of a No Man's Land (not to bring another play into it of course!) but it really is. I mean, if you ask a typical American about what would a normal person from Idaho be like? They'd have no clue. No clue. 

JB:    And in the politics of modern America, Where would you say Idaho sits? 

Shuler:    I don't know. I think it's a mystery. It's just like a frontier. I have been to Moscow, Idaho once. I drove down from Seattle, Washington because there was a wedding that I was a part of. The bachelor party was in Moscow, Idaho. It feels like you're in the middle of outer space because there were no street lights at the time, so you're driving through these massive national parks in the dark. You can just see as far as your headlights are, and then all of a sudden there's this town. It's a big town but it's sort of surrounded by wilderness, so very isolated. It's just a really interesting area. I wouldn't know what the politics are because it's its own world. 

JB:    Is there a hope that The Whale may come into London? 

Shuler:    That is our hope! 

Whenever there's something I'm doing in the States that I really believe in, I always think of how we can get it to England because I think the theatre community here is very knowledgeable. The British are very supportive of theatre and I've just loved working here.


The Whale plays at the Ustinov Studio until 2nd June
Photo credits for The Whale images: Simon Annand

Young Frankenstein - Review

Garrick Theatre, London


****

Music and lyrics by Mel Brooks
Book by Mel Brooks and Thomas Meehan
Directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman

Hadley Fraser and Shuler Hensley

Not since the pairing of Bialystock and Bloom has there been a theatrical partnership to match that of Mel Brooks and Susan Stroman. He’s an irreverent comic genius who for 70 years has taken no prisoners in his mocking of life’s stereotypes and injustices while she is one of the most perceptive and assured director/choreographers of her generation. And so it is that their latest collaboration Young Frankenstein, recently arrived from Broadway to open at London’s Garrick Theatre, is another triumph.

Like The Producers before it, Young Frankenstein hails from a Brooks movie of some 40 years earlier with the veteran writer/director reframing the comedy-horror flick around his own composition of words and music. And much like Dr Frankenstein’s eponymous creature, Brooks (together with Stroman) has re-animated his story into exceptional musical theatre. If Sunset Boulevard is a sincere tribute to the romance of post-war Hollywood, then Young Frankenstein is an as-loving parody of the same time and place, but played for laughs. 

Snowflakes be warned, there are no “safe spaces” in this show as Brooks makes fun not only of cinematic genres, but also, and mercilessly, of men, women and for good measure exhumed corpses too. The jokes may be as corny as they are smutty, but Brooks knows just how far to dig in mining this rich and timeless seam of humour, throwing political correctness to the wind.

The plot (very) loosely follows the classic story, with Hadley Fraser as the fine-voiced young Dr Frankenstein leaving his slightly matriarchal fiancée Elizabeth played by Dianne Pilkington and setting off from New York (aboard the HMS Queen Mary Shelley, geddit?) to travel to his infamous grandfather’s castle in Transylvania.

Once there and in the heart of Europe, (and oh how Hollywood has, for decades, loved to view our continent as full of nightmarish monsters) the young Doctor meets a string of characters that are straight out of the 1950s B-Movie playbook

Ross Noble is Igor, the hunched assistant, Lesley Joseph plays Frau Blucher an older woman with a sinister past, while Summer Strallen is Inga whose character is largely a recreation of The Producers’ Ulla.

Noble’s talent lies in stand-up comedy - though he applies himself brilliantly to the scripted confines of Igor’s ineptness. Joseph however is quite simply an old-school comedy master. She works the room and with her big number He Vas My Boyfriend offers up a gloriously pastiche of Marlene Dietrich.

Strallen’s Inga sends the comedy straight back to the 1970s - gifted in song, dance and performance, her turn defines the cliché that Brooks has created for her.

There’s eye-watering stuff from Patrick Clancy who doubles up both as the village’s police Inspector as well as a Hermit who befriends the monster. Clancy is also a talented pro who’s worked with Brooks before - his timing is spot on, with slapstick that is as hilarious as it is offensive.

Notwithstanding the occasional lapse in pace, Stroman’s staging is inspired. Act 2 may contain some wittily brilliant tap routines that spoof Top Hat delightfully, but the first half’s number Hang Him Til He’s Dead sees the pitchfork-waving mob of villagers choreographed into an embarrassingly joyous hangman’s dance. And as for the horses that haul Dr Frankenstein’s cart to the castle, never has the equine form been staged or suggested with such ingenuity and comedy.

Perhaps the biggest accolade of the night is due to Shuler Hensley who plays The Monster. Only rarely seen on this side of the Atlantic (he was last in London in the 90s for an Olivier-winning turn as the monstrous Jud in the National Theatre’s Oklahoma) Hensley created The Monster on Broadway before touring with the show and he breathes a life into one of the canon’s most curious characters. His Monster has to evolve from being of virtually zero-intelligence, to a creature that’s far more sophisticated. To reveal any more would be to spoil - suffice to say that Hensley masters the transformation magnificently.

As this review is published, the producers have announced that the run is extending into late 2018. Hurrah! Young Frankenstein is a fabulous night out.

Booking until 29th September 2018

Photo credit: Manuel Harlan

Something Rotten! - Review

St James Theatre, New York


****


Music and lyrics by Karey Kirkpatrick and Wayne Kirkpatrick
Book by Karey Kirkpatrick and John O'Farrell
Directed and choreographed by Casey Nicholaw

Brad Oscar and  Rob McClure

Readers with sharp memories will recall that Mel Brooks' The Producers begins on Broadway outside the opening night of Max Bialystock's latest show Funny Boy, A Musical Version Of Hamlet. So….fast forward to today and Something Rotten! is born of a similar mock-Shakespeare stable. Set in that cliched world of olde Elizabethan England that many Americans believe still exists on the other side of the Atlantic it's all ruffs, Tudor beams and, for British readers of a certain age, a bit of an American take on Carry On Shakespeare.

We meet the Bottom Brothers (Rob McClure and Josh Grisetti), two playwrights continually frustrated with living in Shakespeare's shadow. Nick Bottom is desperate, just for once, to trump the Bard at writing, so cheatingly consults soothsayer Nostradamus (fabulous work from Brad Oscar) asking what Shakespeare's greatest hit will be.

Nostradamus informs Bottom that not only will Shakespeare's greatest hit be a show called "Omelette" (think about it….), but that also, in the future, audiences will enjoy a new theatrical genre to be known as “musical”. This lead in not only allows Oscar to steal the show’s first half with the irresistibly funny number A Musical that sends up most of the classic Broadway shows brilliantly, it also sets the the scene for the Bottom Brothers to set about creating Omelette – The Musical.

From there flows a string of corny gags as the show references classic Shakespeare quotes and misquotes and much like Mel Brooks' creation of a preening pouting Fuhrer in Springtime For Hitler, so too do Karey and Wayne Kirkpatrick send up Will Chase’s William Shakespeare even further by camping him up as a leather clad sex god, bestriding the stage reciting suggestive sonnets.

The show’s melodies are memorable for their style and the dance routines are superb. The script however, is no Spamalot. Whilst there's a modicum of wit in Shakespeare's self-proclamation that he "put the I Am into iambic pentameter" it's extinguished by the Ensemble telling Nick Bottom "Don't be a penis, the man is a genius". Oh, and the act one closer has that bottom-scraper of a title, Bottom's Gonna Be On Top. Classy, not.

Of course no one in modern theatre knows better than Nicholaw how to put on a show. The dance work is lavish and stunningly drilled and the theatre was packed with Americans who for the most part were sobbing with laughter. Packed with industry references and in-jokes, if you know your musical theatre, you’ll love the show. And confessing a guilty secret…this Brit really rather liked it too.

On Broadway until December, and then touring across the USA

Photo credit: Joan Marcus

Bad Jews - Review

Arts Theatre, London

**

Written by Joshua Harmon

Directed by Michael Longhurst 

Ilan Goodman and Jenna Augen

Acclaimed at Bath last year and sold out at London's St James Theatre in January, Bad Jews now makes the short hop across town to the Arts Theatre to meet an almost insatiable demand to see the show. Indeed the clamour for tickets has been so strong that it led comedienne Ruby Wax to tweet recently of Bad Jews' "mostly Jewish audience. If you insult them, they will come”.

The play is provocatively titled because as Harmon admits in the programme, eleven years ago and before a plot had even evolved, he thought it would be "a good title for a play". Hmm. A dodgy premise for any creative work. Substance needs to come before the packaging and ultimately Bad Jews makes for mediocre drama.

Three Jewish cousins (plus Melody the Christian girlfriend of one cousin) are gathered in New York for the funeral of grandfather Poppy, a Holocaust survivor. Amidst familiar and familial spats of jealousy, rivalry and momentary affection, the plot's action focusses upon a Jewish necklace (a Chai) that Poppy had kept concealed during his time in the camps.

Religiously committed granddaughter Daphna believes the Chai should rightfully be hers whilst assimilated cousin Liam (who via some family chicanery, already possesses the necklace) is on the cusp of proposing to Melody and plans to give her the Chai in place of a traditional engagement ring. Daphna’s nauseated fury at Liam’s plan is understandable. However where Harmon abuses our disbelief, whose suspension is already hanging by a thread, is in asking us to accept the conceit that WASP Melody would even prefer the battered Chai over a diamond solitaire.  It makes for an in-credible pivotal plot-line.

To be fair, Harmon does thread some strands of relevance into his work. His exposition of the vain and arrogant self-belief of Daphna's piety is spot-on and he offers a further morsel of intellectual meat to chew on as he references the impact of assimilation and "marrying out" upon Judaism's cultural heritage. Noble arguments and credit too for his attempt to address the impact of the Holocaust upon third generation survivors. But ultimately it's all packaged up in a bundle of writing that far too often makes for a tedious naivety. Where Arthur Miller once brought a scalpel-like precision to such complex studies of humanity, Harmon wields mallet and chisel and it shows.

Speaking to The Guardian recently Harmon tells of how just before the play opened in Bath, that he had cut a line from the text that referred to the safety in being Jewish today, recognising that the sentiment didn't accurately reflect the current experience of European Jews. Whilst the edit was necessary, actually the chopped words should never have been written in the first place. For most of the last millennium continental Europe has been a deadly place for Jews - and that's both before and after Hitler - and Harmon's failure to acknowledge that continuum, even as he wrote Bad Jews, evidences a worrying ignorance.

And that side-splitting comedy? The programme notes reference Mel Brooks’ The Producers in which Brooks brilliantly lampooned Hitler in his 1968 farce and subsequent musical.  However, that The Producers worked at all was because Brooks craftily mocked an evil regime. Here, by contrast, Bad Jews' audience rather than laughing at the Nazis, are invited to guffaw at a surviving family's struggles to cope with the Holocaust's devastating legacy. There’s a whiff of freak-show here and it leaves a nasty taste.

Further credit to some of the performers. Ilan Goodman's Liam is a focussed channelled force, who notwithstanding the ridiculously Fawlty-esque extremes imposed upon his character, makes us believe in his comfortably assimilated Jewish identity, as well as his love for Melody. Playing his love interest, Gina Bramhill is a strawberry blonde genteel gentile. It's a novel twist that sees the non-Jew sketched out as a caricatured stereotype, but again and to her credit, Bramhill makes fabulous work of some occasionally ghastly dialogue. That Jenna Augen's Daphna, almost a year into the play's run, speaks too often in a squeaky gabble is mind boggling.

Completing the quartet, Joe Coen's Jonah is the Beavis-type silent one, who too little too late offers an endgame revelation that deserves more analysis from Harmon than the (yet another) sensational moment it is given.

In his song Shikse Goddess, taken from The Last Five Years, Broadway composer Jason Robert Brown, nails the complex and awkward nuances of assimilation with witty yet profound analysis in four minutes. Harmon takes more than an hour and a half to clumsily cover much of the same ground. Somewhere in Bad Jews there could be a good play struggling to emerge. This ain't it.


Runs to 30th May 2015

The Producers - Review

Churchill Theatre, Bromley

****

Music and lyrics by Mel Brooks
Book by Mel Brooks and Thomas Meehan

Jason Manford and Cory English

The headline cast of The Producers is almost a who's who of today's popular entertainment scene. Jason Manford, Louie Spence and Phill Jupitus all take principal roles alongside the lesser known (but nonetheless industry greats) Cory English, David Bedella and the stunning Tiffany Graves. They lead a company that delivers flawless performances as they dust off Mel Brooks deliciously dated musical.

The 12 Tony-winning musical wowed Broadway in 2001, but of course the original yarn was spun by Brooks in his 1968 Oscar winning movie - and it is to that film that this touring revival pays homage. The onstage newspaper headlines scream of LBJ and Vietnam as shyster Broadway producer Max Bialystock, so richly defined by Zero Mostel in the 60s, slicked-back hair and red smoking jacket, is neatly caricatured by Cory English. Back in the day Gene Wilder defined the nebbish (google it) that is frustrated accountant Leo Bloom. In 2015 Jason Manford (a surprisingly big fella in the flesh) makes the most of his lumbering features to define Bloom's wondrously hopeless inadequacies. Manford’s anxiety-ridden Bloom seriously exceeds expectations.

The story could be neither more tasteless nor more famous. As humble clerk Bloom realises that were a show to prove a guaranteed flop then amoral producers could sell its rights many times over and embezzle the investors' cash. Bialystock pounces on this stroke of (criminal) genius and takes Bloom into partnership. Sourcing possibly the worst script in town, Springtime For Hitler written by a crazed former Nazi and hiring Roger De Bris, a disastrous director to helm it, failure is a certainty. Until of course De Bris delivers a Fuhrer who's camper than Christmas and the Broadway crowds go wild...

Cory English has previous as Bialystock, having played the producer on Drury Lane and he masters the ways of the wily granny-shagger with aplomb, his 11 o’clock number Betrayed being a particular treat. Mel Brook's Borsht Belt comedy roots (google that too) are manifest in Bialystock’s corny patter, as his unique style merges Sid James’ Carry On smut with a wry sense of self-deprecation that's as New York Jewish as pastrami on rye.

The biggest butt (pun intended) of Brook’s gags is of course Hitler and the Nazis – and what better way to humiliate a truly evil force than to laugh at it (With a momentary pause to sadly wish “if only” that could be the case in today’s troubled world). Along the way however and in alphabetical order, blacks, gays, Irish, Jews and Swedes are all mercilessly mocked in a show that makes for one big guilty pleasure.

David Bedella’s De Bris is a high priest of high camp. Preening and pouting, he is poured into his dress – and gives Hitler just the right touch of manic megalomania too.  Louie Spence as his posturing assistant Carmen Ghia has a modest role but milks it magnificently with a movement that is as technically brilliant as it his hilarious.  And whoever thought of Phill Jupitus to play the Nazi Franz Liebkind deserves the Iron Cross. The comedian’s (rarely seen) fat, pasty, lederhosen-clad legs add visual genius to the deluded German. Be in no doubt, Jupitus cannot sing and his almost solo number, Haben Sie gehört das deutsche Band will stay with me for a long time.

Meanwhile, leading lady Tiffany Graves’ blonde bombshell Ulla simply steals her every scene. Graves' accent is wonderfully caricatured, her singing sensational whilst her dance and cartwheeling/backflipping movement is jaw-dropping. Sporting fabulous tresses (kudos to wig mistress Sally Tynan) Graves is every inch the (not so dumb) Swedish Blonde.

Magnificence elsewhere from Lee Proud’s choreography, with the big numbers of Along Came Bialy (complete with denture wielding tap-dancing geriatrics) and Springtime For Hitler evidencing a company well drilled in dance routines that blend professional precision with immaculate comic timing. And look out for the unexpected nod to the Vulgarian (aka Germanic) Doll On A Music Box routine from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang as the Springtime number kicks off. 

Bravo too to Andrew Hilton’s nine-piece band who give Brooks’ compositions the bold and brassy treatment they deserve.

The Producers’ producers have clearly piled their cash (or their investors’ ?) into the cast and it shows as Matthew White directs a magnificent 5* flawless troupe. But the un-inspiring scenery wobbles, the tank-gun helmets of the dancing Nazi showgirls look like they are Blue Peter inspired cardboard creations and unforgivably, Hitler’s moustache fell off in his big number Heil Myself! Bedella to his credit gamely played on – but where were the professional production values? The show's future audiences deserve a little better.

As entertainment, this touring production of The Producers provides a sensational night out at the theatre. Top notch actors, delivering top notch routines. It makes for one of those rare nights when cheeks will ache from grinning. If you love comedy and musicals it’s unmissable. Brilliant, irreverent, hilarious and all performed by one of the best companies on the road today.

Plays until 14th March, then on tour.