The Producers – Memphis Flyer

People. People who need people…”

Oh my god, somebody make it stop! I could go the rest of my life without hearing that awful, awful song. But I know there’s no escaping it, and that’s what makes me especially thankful for the play Buyer & Cellar. Jonathan Tolins’ wise, Barbra Streisand-inspired comedy shines fresh light on old claptrap, making otherwise intolerable things more riveting than they deserve to be. Over the course of 90 preposterous minutes, Tolins made me care more about his fictional version of Streisand than I’ve ever been able to care about the real thing. The script presents as kitschy fluff, but the whole is considerably (somewhat mysteriously) more satisfying than the sum of its many hilarious bits.

Acknowledging Streisand’s litigious nature, Tolins opens Buyer & Cellar with a lengthy disclaimer. Nothing that happens in the play is real. Well, almost nothing. Babs is obviously real. She really owns a home in Malibu. In 2010, she actually published a coffee table book titled My Passion for Design, and the storage basement underneath her barn really is laid out like a shopping mall. The play transforms into fiction when it imagines what it might be like to work as the lone shopkeeper in Streisand’s artificial underground world, engaging with the lady of the house in some good, old-fashioned master-servant role-playing.

With his gleefully understated performance, Jordan Nichols single-handedly counterbalances all the enormous Broadway musicals running on other area stages. He introduces himself directly to the audience as Alex, an underemployed actor who’s agreed to become the human doll in Streisand’s private collection. He also plays Streisand and Barry, Alex’s boyfriend who can’t wrap his mind around the idea that a “privileged, powerful woman” like the Babs “still acts like a Dickensian victim.”

Nichols also walks the not-so-thin line separating diva and Devo by playing some of Buyer & Cellar‘s more prominent inanimate objects as well. Between scenes, he provides the mind-numbing, soul-crushing hum of vending machines. Pitch perfect.

Buyer & Cellar is at Circuit Playhouse through September 6th.

Three cheers for Theatre Memphis’ first-rate production of Mel Brooks’ enormously successful musical adaptation of his 1967 film, The Producers. It’s epically extravagant. It’s appropriately ridiculous. Director Cecelia Wingate and her extraordinary cast of low-brow comedians may have even out-Mel Brooksed the actual Mel Brooks. Having said all of that, I’m going to complain a little.

Wingate sees details other directors miss, but she tends to underscore all of them, overstuffing her plays with so many juicy bits and clever gags, it’s sometimes hard to distinguish between the stuffing and the meat. The Producers‘ success is rooted in its excess, making the overall experience more about brute force than outrageous farce. And, to be fair, it’s a pretty spectacular display of force.

Philip Andrew Himebook and Lee Hudson Gilliland are perfectly suited for their roles as Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom, the colorfully corrupt Broadway producers who are literally and figuratively screwing all the little old ladies in town. The former is a larger-than-life blowhard and bully. The latter a nebbish who has panic attacks when separated from his little blue blanket. They’ve formed an unlikely partnership to produce Springtime for Hitler, a play so offensive and awful it’s received as a work of satirical genius. That’s bad news for B&B, since the entire con was predicated on the show’s failure.

The Producers is a designer’s show, with hundreds of costume changes and a unique set of technical challenges. Theatre Memphis’ creative team has risen to the occasion and deserves top bows. From its illuminated swastikas to its spinning illuminated swastikas, The Producers‘ “Springtime for Hitler” sequence is an all-you-can-eat Bavarian buffet of bold choices and bad taste.

When Playhouse on the Square staged the regional premiere of The Producers in 2008, I groused that it was too understated. This time out, Theatre Memphis has erred, boldly, and often brilliantly, in the other direction. In a play where showgirls wear gigantic pretzels and sausages on their heads, that’s absolutely the side to err on.

Times certainly do change. When Mel Brooks’ smash, multiple Tony award-winning musical adaptation of his satirical 1968 film, The Producers opened on Broadway in 2001 it was gobbled up whole by critics who, in euphoric spasms, described it as nourishing comic manna from old-school showbusiness heaven. The slobbering reception, if a bit sycophantic, had to at least be sweet vindication for Brooks, a master parodist who won a best screenplay Oscar for the original film only after watching it stink up the box office amid angry, nearly universal critical outrage. Even the drug-taking, lovemaking, rock-and-roll revolutionaries of ’68 rejected Brooks’ iconoclasm and his evenhanded mockery of both the ossified establishment and the self-important counterculture. It probably goes without saying that a scant two decades after the end of WWII, mainstream America still wasn’t quite prepared for the satirical story of two Jewish swindlers (brilliantly and manically played by Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder) who concoct a plan to bilk millions from investors in a glitzy Broadway show called Springtime For Hitler, a musical celebrating in song and dance the glorious achievements of a handsome young fuhrer and his hip, hypersexualized Nazi Party.

For all of its naughty words and bad intentions the retooled Producers musical is never all that shocking to anyone except perhaps the militantly prudish and gay activists who might be offended by how long Brooks tries to drag out the same “laugh-at-the-funny-homos” gag. And that’s a bit of a problem. We should, at the very least, be joyously grossed out by these revolting creatures of pure avarice, just as we were by Mostel and Wilder’s original takes on the repulsive Bialystock and his compulsive partner Bloom. But just like it’s equally groundbreaking movie-to-musical cousins Hairspray and Monty Python’s The Holy Grail, The Producers loses a more than it gains in its translation to the stage. Like The Holy Grail, in particular, it becomes a fetish object for fans who can’t wait to stroke their programs while silently mouthing their favorite lines along with the cast. And at Playhouse on the Square’s final preview there were more than a few people in the crowd vibrating in their seats, anticipating such famous quips as, “Blue Blanket!” and “I’m in pain, I’m wet, AND I’M STILL HYSTERICAL!”

Playhouse heavy-hitter Dave Landis seems like he should be able to settle fairly easily into the slippery shoes of the greedy, grossly libidinous Broadway producer Max Bialystock. That’s not the case, however, as Landis, the exceptional director of Compleat Female Stage Beauty, plays the role too close to his vest allowing his equally gifted costar Michael Detroit to upstage him at every turn in the role of Bloom, a sputtering nebbish.

Ken Zimmerman, Playhouse on the Square’s original artistic director, who put audiences in the aisles with his portrayal of a wicked, if pragmatic capitalist in last season’s Urinetown, engages in some expert scenery-chewing as the flamboyantly homosexual (not to mention completely thick) Broadway director Roger De Bris. He obviously (and rightfully) derives a tremendous amount of pleasure knowing just how much his sparkling, silver dress makes him resemble the Chrysler building. David Foster, last seen as a mildly effective Johnny Depp wannabe in Pirates of Penzance is no less delightful as Carmin Ghia, Zimmerman’s houseboy and partner in fabulousness. It’s a true shame that Foster’s only given one threadbare joke to stretch over the entire show, though he swishes through it with zany aplomb.

Bruce Bergner’s scenic design, a mix of painted drops and practical furniture on wagons, is almost as flat and uninspired as Ben Wheeler’s lights and Jay Berkow’s bloodless choreography. To that end The Producers is the perfect opposite of Theatre Memphis’ West Side Story where extraordinary design and tight dancing make up for an unevenness among actors and vocalists. In this case, bland design and washed out lighting leaves Landis, Detroit, and a talented cast of professionals looking like well-intentioned community theater performers.

Showgirls wearing giant pretzels, Volkswagens, weiners, and German Shepherds on their heads will always by funny. But once you get past the awesome headgear, Rebecca Powell’s costumes for the “Springtime for Hitler” sequence are just plain boring. Brooks’ design team took appropriately the look to extremes of sexual fetishism and anything short of that is going to be a letdown. As cute as dancing girls in too-short liederhozen may be, they just can’t compete with the sadomasochist connotations of stormtroopers in tight leather hipboots.

To do justice to The Producers a director must push beyond the boundaries of good taste to see if Brooks’ time-proven material can still make audiences squirm with guilty delight. It’s an exercise in excess irreverence given a minimal, overly reverent treatment in its Memphis premiere.

by Chris Davis