Kathmandu:

Brilliant, bawdy and brash, The Producers is belly laugh funny, vulgar, in bad taste and thoroughly enjoyable.

BBC’s Tom Brooks describes the movie’s history, “Mel Brooks’ hit award winning musical The Producers, which began life four years ago on Broadway, has now been transformed into a new movie having begun life as a classic movie that was released 37 years ago. It is a bit of a mind-boggling phenomenon: a movie made in 2005, inspired by a stage musical that opened in 2001, that was inspired by a film released in 1968.

The basic plot remains the same: Broadway producer Max Bialystock conspires with a timid accountant Matthew Broderick to make a fortune by staging a theatrical production designed to be a flop. Comedy King Mel Brooks’ was key to this movie — he was the film’s producer and he wrote the screenplay. Many of the major roles are played by the original Broadway cast, the exceptions being Uma Thurman, who portrays Ulla the Swedish secretary, and Will Ferrell as the playwright who adores Hitler.”

Adds critic David Horiuchi, “The chief drawing card, of course, is Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick reprising their roles from the stage. Lane plays Max Bialystock, a legendary Broadway producer who hasn’t had a hit show in a long time. Enter nebbish accountant Leo Bloom (Broderick), who tells Bialystock he could actually make more money with a flop than a hit. So the two set out to produce the worst Broadway musical of all time, one guaranteed to close on opening night, with the collaboration of an outrageous cast of characters: Ferrell as sieg heil-ing author Franz Liebkind, Thurman as Swedish bombshell Ulla, Gary Beach as director Roger De Bris, and Roger Bart as his assistant, Carmen Ghia, among others.

“As directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman (who did the same honours on Broadway) and co-written by Mel Brooks, The Producers is laugh-out-loud funny. It’s also a relentlessly over-the-top, shamelessly bawdy, stereotype-ridden comedy that may turn off its audience just as much as its centerpiece, Springtime for Hitler, was intended to. But Broadway fans who are used to larger-than-life figures who play to the back row while showering the first row with spit, are likely to forgive and just enjoy the famous granny-walker dance, a supporting cast dotted with Broadway performers or the mere spectacle of seeing Lane and Broderick memorialising the performances that millions never got a ticket to see.”

Says Premiere Magazine’s Glenn Kenny, “Fans of the stage show will recognise instantly the film’s charm, which it has in spades. Those newer to the material might take a little while to settle into the breakneck cadence of ridiculousness, but once you drink in The Producers, it’s a thoroughly enjoyable descent into madness.”

Tom Brooks declares, “This movie is definitely over the top — nearly all the portrayals are exaggerated stereotypes, including the non-stop parade of outlandish gay characters. Some who’ve seen the film complain it’s homophobic, but the director maintains nothing negative is intended. Susan Stroman says, “I think the brilliance of Brooks’ lyrics is he talks about gay, he uses that word gay, but it only means bright, and sunny, and funny. Just because it’s sung by a man in a sequin dress, you might think it means something else, but in fact the lyric is always about being happy.” Says Ferrell, “I enjoyed it. It’s probably the hardest I had to work at anything, in a way, just to get the songs down, and the choreography and to step into something that was already a well-oiled machine.”