"The Producers," The Maverick Theater

Tucking into Mel Brooks's "The Producers," directed by Brian Newell, in that innocuous little Maverick Theatre across from the train station, is like opening a music box and then being bedazzled at the glittering and spirited theatrical spectacle contained inside. All night long the cast was in sync, no mean feat given its twenty-foot stage on which was strewn, variously, a theatre facade on a busy street, an office, a stage set, an East Side apartment, and a jail cell. Giving nifty little twists to each imaginable theatrical stereotype, the cast had the audience eating out of their hands, as did the formidable Ensemble, with its outlandish old ladies with walkers and tap dancing Nazis.

Veering wildly from the contrived to the outlandish, from the devious to the accidental, the production recounts the tale of a washed up Broadway producer (a musical about Hamlet?) who gives up on such ephemeral things as fame and settles instead for a more quantifiable fortune. In the process -- and to his chagrin -- he creates an inadvertent hit, but not before giving us, down to the last umlaut, a behind the curtain look at the underbelly of the theatre world. The curious way it procures funding (before this production I used to thank that grant writing was the world's oldest profession). The tidal fickleness of audiences. And the miracle of how, given the combustible mix of creative egos, any show gets produced in the first place.

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