Synopsis

"The Producers," a musical by Mel Brooks is about Max Bialystock, an operatically desperate impresario of Broadway flops, meets Leopold Bloom, a public accountant who is as repressed as Max is flamboyant. This unlikely couple cooks up what would seem to be a sure-fire scam, given Max's history: produce a play that is guaranteed to fail, selling more than 1,000 percent in investments, and then abscond with the backers' money. Their choice as the worst of all possible plays? A paean to the Third Reich by one Franz Liebkind (Brad Oscar), a pigeon-keeping Nazi, called "Springtime for Hitler." And for the worst of all possible directors? This is all more or less straight from the movie, as is Max's systematic trading of sexual favors for checks (made out to "Cash," which is remarked upon as an unusual title for a play) with scores of rich, lonely geriatric women.

Leopold Bloom, puts aside the boyish charm, for once, creating a slumped, adenoidal figure that suggests a male version of Peggy Cass's Agnes Gooch in "Auntie Mame." It's a cartoon, you think at first; he won't be able to sustain it. But he does, somehow managing to make hunched introversion into an extroverted style. Leo remains a deadpan hysteric, even as he picks up a top hat and cane to lead a bevy of Amazonian chorines through a fantasy routine in which he sees his name in lights.

There should, in fact, be plenty in "The Producers" to offend all sorts of people. You could start with the characterization of the effete Roger De Bris and the Village People-like artistic crew overseen by his sinuously swishy assistant (Roger Bart), who of course becomes a victim of the old "walk this way" gag. And then there's Ulla (Cady Huffman), the ultimate sex machine of a Swedish secretary with the requisite unpronounceable name.

The dialogue and Brooks' agreeable new songs, which nod unabashedly to pre-rock musicals, also enhance the character and plot development depicted in the movie version. Max's sorry financial predicament, for instance, is established in an opening segment exhibiting the failure of Funny Boy, his musical adaptation of Hamlet. And the frustration that leads Leo Bloom to conspire with him is documented in a scene featuring Bloom's bullying boss.

It seems inevitable that a show that keeps trying to top itself is eventually going to hit the ceiling. And after the "Springtime for Hitler" musical-within-the-musical sequence, which fulfills one's wildest expectations, "The Producers" can't really get any bigger, though it works hard at attempting it.

The triumph is not Brooks' alone. Director/choreographer Susan Stroman already proved herself God's gift to contemporary musical theater with Contact and last season's revival of The Music Man.