Andy Taylor, Bob Amaral, Stuart Marland, Rich Addannato and Company

Fasten your seat belts…it’s a zany evening
of raucous fun as ‘The Producers’ opens
to laughs, fun at St. Louis’ Fabulous Fox Theater

By Daniel Hines
Publisher
America’s Seniors at www.TodaysSeniorsNetwork.com

When we interviewed Mike Isaacson about the 2004-05 schedule of shows at St. Louis’ Fabulous Fox Theater, he said he was confident in the production quality of each show, and, picking up on the theme of the season, added, ‘This season has legs…”

The opening night of ‘The Producers’ has proven that he was right. ‘Producers’ offers a zany evening of raucous fun in the madcap Mel Brooks (the author) style.

The plot of the show? Failed producer (Bialystock) has flop after flop with no money coming in, until failed accountant (Bloom) points out that a produce can make more money with a failure than with a success…and presto, the plot, which is really nothing more than a vehicle for the comedy genius of Brooks, is hatched. Oversubscribe a play that is doomed to failure by picking the worst show, the worst cast, the worst director…well you get the point. Of course, when the can’t succeed show becomes a hit, everything is through into a crooked (producer’s) hat of the type reserved only for those who have produced at least one show.

One has to wonder what goes on inside Brooks’ mind—a failed producer, Max Bialystock, played with an amazing injury and just plain likeability by Bob Amaral, who relies on playing out child-like sexual fantasies with a host of old ladies for funding for his failed productions; a musical within a musical about ‘Springtime for Hitler’ complete with Wagnerian type beautiful and leggy chorus girls surrounded by Storm Troopers, and a singing Hitler; an easily corruptible accountant Leo Bloom (well, maybe it really isn’t too far stretched) played by Andy Taylor who brings a naiveté, psychological problems and thwarted sex drive to his part, which when offset to Amara’s Bialystock, creates a really odd couple, much funnier than Abbott and Costello and Martin and Lewis, although Taylor and Amaral have more than their series of one-liners. (Too long a sentence, but that’s the way this show affects you—before long, you are caught up in the rapid-fire delivery and it becomes almost normal.)

As to the reference to shows this season having legs, this one offers one of the best pairs we’ve seen for some time in Ida Leigh Curtis who plays the Swedish bombshell Ulla, a role that she originated on in the original Broadway production.

Although she can’t speak a word of intelligible English, she speaks a more universal language, and her dance scene for Bialystock and Bloom, in which each responds with biological reactions (we are a family web site) that all teen-age boys have experienced shows that she is not only a beauty, but a great comic and dancer, who just happens to have a great figure, long legs, and a beautiful face.

There are so many outrageous characters in this show, that it is hard to describe all of them: Bill Nolte is appropriately crazy as a Nazi refugee who writes ‘Springtime for Hitler’, only to see it become a vehicle ridiculing the equally crazed German leader.

Stuart Marland is disturbingly likeable as the gay (read: Homosexual) director and drag queen who finally gets his chance to step into the spotlight as he stands in to play and sing Hitler. His ‘significant assistant’ Carmen Ghia (remember, we told you to fasten your seatbelts) played with all the Fab Five appropriateness (if you don’t know who these are, go to Bravo TV) by Rich Affannato is hilarious.

Let’s see. That makes the male libido, homosexuals, the Holocaust, older women (and we mean really old women in Little Old Lady Land, Jewish-American Princesses, the entire German nation, con artists, and a stereotype of a Swedish sexpot, all subjects that are not spared Brooks’ sometimes scathing, but always funny, barbs and portrayals.

The result was evident from the start as the audience laughed—really laughed—even though some of the lines were corny and the pratfalls right out of Vaudeville. It shouldn’t work, but it does, leaving a fitting finish to a season that really did have legs.