Theater: Brush Up Your Goose Step

Mel Brooks is sitting near the back of the almost deserted St. James Theatre a couple of hours before curtain time. A reporter is at his right, yet Brooks stares straight ahead at the empty stage while he talks, as if he can't quite believe what will soon be born there. Most people with a big Broadway show about to open would be busy making fixes, rewriting lines, fighting anxiety. Brooks is mainly feeling recharged, in the way 74-year-old comic legends rarely are. "I haven't been this happy since I did my first sketch on Your Show of Shows with Sid Caesar," he says. "I'm back doing what I was born to do. And I love it."

What's not to love? The Producers, a musical based on Brooks' 1968 movie, opens on Broadway next week with the kind of rapturous buzz (and $13 million in advance sales) not seen since The Lion King. Start with a presold audience, lovers of the classic comedy (the first film Brooks directed) about a schlocky Broadway producer who connives with his nervous accountant to raise money for an awful Nazi musical so they can abscond with the funds when the thing flops. Add the best-possible modern substitutes for stars Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder--Nathan Lane as producer Max Bialystock and Matthew Broderick as nebbishy Leo Bloom--and Broadway's hottest musical director, Susan Stroman (Contact, The Music Man). Support them with a gaggle of Broadway backers so eager that one producer had to hold a lottery to decide which of his investors got the privilege of putting money into the show. "I told them we're all fools," Brooks recounts. "We should have a secret meeting in the cellar of the St. James Theatre, raise $25 million, put on a million-dollar failure and split it up. I don't know why, at the last minute they all backed out."

Smart guys; they've seen the show. The Producers is, first of all, one of the best translations of a beloved movie to the stage ever. Most of Brooks' famous lines and bits are here, including the memorable Springtime for Hitler production number, staged by Stroman with goose-stepping pizazz. The new songs--Brooks wrote the music and the lyrics--are a sprightly retro pastiche, ranging from mock Fiddler on the Roof, to mock Astaire and Rogers, to mock Bavarian beer hall. There's a chorus line of old ladies with walkers, a flock of pigeons doing the Nazi salute and more gay jokes than have crossed a stage since Liberace. The show delivers such a wealth of vaudeville exuberance that the few quibbles (a rather lumpy second act) are likely to fade away. Even if you don't think it's great entertainment, you gotta admit: it's great entertainment value.

People had been bugging Brooks for years to turn The Producers into a musical. But he resisted them all until 1998, when DreamWorks exec David Geffen talked him into giving it a try. "He was a pit bullterrier," says Brooks. "He was on my pants cuff, and I couldn't shake him." It helped that Brooks' movie career was in a slump (his last feature, 1995's Dracula: Dead and Loving It, had flopped) and that Geffen had--"unbeknownst to David Geffen, but knownst to me"--tapped into a longtime dream of Brooks': to write a Broadway score.