Hilaria in Bavaria? What did the critics make of The Producers revival

The reviews are in! Has the new London revival of The Producers got it… and, most importantly, does it flaunt it? Let’s find out…

Sarah Crompton, WhatsOnStage

★★★★

“It hasn’t been seen in London for 20 years, and with the broadness of its caricatures and the lowness of its humour, it’s easy to see why. Yet director Patrick Marber’s new production for the Menier adds enough energy and verve to sweep away the doubts. Faced with a crazed Nazi, a camp director, a Swedish secretary, sex-obsessed old ladies, and two Jewish producers desperate enough to put on Swastika armbands, he simply turns the volume up as high as it will go and sits back to let the fun explode.”

Louis Chilton, The Independent

★★★★

“There is variation, too, in the casting: the brilliant Andy Nyman is far slighter than the original Bialystock Zero Mostel (and smaller too than Nathan Lane, who played him in the 2005 musical film), lending a completely different physicality to the character’s shameless, craven scheming. Marc Antolin, meanwhile, approximates the air of Gene Wilder’s hysterical nebbish, girding it with a sort of mannered precision of his own. The supporting players are roundly excellent, from Harry Morrison through to Joanna Woodward, who plays the preposterously accented Swedish siren Ulla.”

Clive Davis, The Times

★★★★

“The ten musicians in [musical director] Matthew Samer’s salty band are stationed overhead on both sides. Brooks’s songs offer an unfailingly clever pastiche of Broadway genres: sex being a constant motif, he’s happy to find a rude word to rhyme with “Ritz”. If the love affair between Leo and pneumatic Swedish PA, Ulla (here played by Joanna Woodward) has always seemed surplus to requirements, Woodward definitely lands ‘When You’ve Got It, Flaunt It’.”

Arifa Akbar, The Guardian

★★★★

“Still so original, and delightfully – daringly – funny, it is revived by director Patrick Marber with such vigour, sparkle and controlled wildness that it renders itself the London show of the festive season – funnier, camper and more outre than pantomime, although it pulls back from the full freight of the danger in its political satire.”

Dominic Cavendish,The Telegraph

★★★★

“An outright living legend, Mel Brooks turned 98 in June… You marvel at the staying-power of the man – and his gag-a-minute, flamboyantly un-PC breakthrough. Beginning life on screen in 1967 (and earning him an Oscar) before he translated it (with Thomas Meehan) into a Tony Award-harvesting stage blockbuster in 2001, it combines the enduring ridicule of money-grubbing Broadway producers with a lasting capacity to bait outrage. That’s courtesy of the scheme hatched by ageing impresario Max Bialystock and his adopted accountant sidekick Leo Bloom to mount an all-singing, all-dancing celebration of the Führer – Springtime for Hitler – as a ‘surefire’ means of engineering a flop, leaving them with piles of unused investment.”

Nick Curtis, The Standard

★★★★

“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.”

Matt Hemley, The Stage

★★★★

“The highlight, however, comes in the form of Trevor Ashley’s Roger De Bris, the director tasked with helming Springtime for Hitler, who eventually finds himself playing the Nazi leader when the musical within a musical is brought stunningly to life. Ashley’s expressions, voice and comic timing are spot on. His Judy Garland-infused Hitler is a wonder. And when he’s surrounded by the rest of the cast, with pretzels and frankfurters on top of their heads, you don’t want it to end.”

Andrzej Lukowski, Time Out

★★★★

“Marber has a much tougher, grimier take on The Producers than the polished original production – the shabbiness of mid-twentieth century New York is virtually an extra character, and in a career-best tun, Andy Nyman’s unscrupulous protagonist Max Bialystock looks positively Dickensian in his stained waistcoat, grubby jacket and lank hair.”