Review: The Producers

PRODUCERS OF JOY ARE PARDONED

The older TV generation remembers the 1960s series Secret Agent 86, whose screenwriter Mel Brooks later made feature films. In 1968, he directed The Producers, a film parodying the musical show business.
Its Finnish title , Spring Dawns for Hitler, is taken from the “worst play in the world” within the story, which Broadway king producer Max Bialystock and his accountant Leo Bloom have to get rich by collecting production money from rich widows and putting it in their own pockets after a guaranteed flop.
Three decades later, Brooks was lured to co-author Thomas Meehan with screenwriter Thomas Meehan to adapt his film into a stage musical.
He also became its composer after Jerry Herman (e.g. Hello Dolly!) had declined the honour.
The result was a musical farce that premiered in 2001 and garnered a dozen Tony Awards. The Finnish premiere will now be seen as a tasty translation by Kristiina Drews and Jukka Virtanen and rhythmic direction by Neil Hardwick .
Although this musical has been said to go against Hitler and the neo-Nazis from afar, it really has nothing to do with politics.

The Producers is pure entertainment that lowers play at the expense of the musical genre. There is self-irony in it: in the story, Max and Leo, who end up behind bars – as well as the talentless Nazi writer of the play they produced – are pardoned because they have brought joy to their fellow prisoners.
A musical doesn’t have to have any other purpose either.

Mel Brooks’ music is not immortally original, but it is functional. The compositions skilfully utilise the traditions of the American musical and the European borrowings that belong to it. Everything sounds so safely familiar that you don’t understand to miss even one memorable hit.
The veteran who plays Max Bialystock, Esko Roine, 62, who has retired from the position of director of the Tampere Workers’ Theatre, is in good shape, also vocally.
The masterful stage performance is represented by a solo scene towards the end of the performance, in which Max, who has been put in a cell, repeats the previous events as a musical potpourri. Antti Timonen , who is part of his own house, is also a good singer and as a guy suitable for the role of Leo, who protects his boyhood.
The theatre’s new sight is Anna-Maija Tuokko, who is a real charm and a delight to the eye. Oh yes, she can act, sing and dance. The point of view is thus exhilaratingly chauvinistic and clichéd, with which Risto Kaskilahti steals his scenes as the leather-panted temporary writer Franz and Lari Halme as the gay duke Carmen Ghia.
The staging is visually a full musical, and the stage design of Hitler’s rise to power, among other things, is so impressive that it is already on a knife’s edge, whether it remains a parody or leans towards admiration.
This is how we masses are tricked, if we are not sharp: I sank into entertainment.