Too Bad To Fail

There’s no hanging around on opening night for producer Max Bialystock. 

“Reviews come out faster when the critics leave at intermission,” he tells us, thumbing the pages of a newspaper for word on “Funny Boy,” his latest show, a musical based on “Hamlet.”

Max has done it again. Once “the king of old Broadway” — he invented theater in the round; then theater in the square “where nobody had a good seat.” But times have changed and Max, a fat, sweaty, rapacious fellow who schtups (OK, romances) old ladies to finance his productions, is tired of failure. He wants success, of a kind, and his accountant, Leo Bloom, a frightened, moist little guy who believes in keeping both books and living straight (in every sense) gives him the big idea: produce a show featuring Nazis, homosexuals (both male and female), transexuals, crooks, and don’t forget sex-starved old ladies tap dancing with their walkers, and, finally, a song with the lines: “Springtime for Hitler and Germany, winter for Poland and France.” It all combines to make a script so offensive to everybody the musical will “close on page 4,”

Max says.

The idea here, as everyone who started going to movies since 1968 when the Mel Brooks film first appeared, is to sell shares in a show that fails, the sooner the better, and then abscond with the investors’ cash. 

In short, profit from the next failure. “Springtime for Hitler” is born.

What makes it a success, alas, is its absurdity. 

Start with Carmen Ghia, assistant to director Roger DeBris, played by the old scene- stealer Lou Trapani (who, as it turns out, produced this production of  “The Producers”). Trapani, who says he quit acting because he got so many gay roles, swans about the stage in a purple jump suit, mispronouncing names, gesturing wildly and walking as a French courtier, all languid and loose-kneed. 

Then there’s Ulla Inga Hansen Bensen-Yonsen Tallen-Hallen- Svaden-Svanson, the Swedish secretary, played by Aubrey Flick, who, according to the progam, “has been training in aerial,” and gets to hang head down and twirl from the flies lashed to a swath of red cloth in the finalé.

David Foster as De Bris, the director who worries about looking like the Chrysler building in a gray gown and art deco crown, is wonderfully droll.

As Max, Johnny Dell — a stage name if ever I heard one — is a master of gags: quick, sly with material too seamy to really offend, like the tale of the milkmaid and the well endowed stable boy he plays with his moneyed old ladies. And then there is Leo, the chicken-hearted accountant, so deftly played by Jarek Zabczynski (probably not a stage name) that you are thrilled when this meek and fearful lad morphs into a jolly miscreant.

It is all accomplished with such unblinking skill that “The Producers,” as in “Springtime for Hitler,” comes off as too absurd to offend.

“The Producers” runs at The Center for Performing Arts at Rhinebeck through June 7. For tickets, call 845-876-3080.