Review: The Producers, Garrick Theatre
At the Garrick Theatre, bad taste is not merely embraced. It is choreographed, covered in sequins and sent goose-stepping across the stage. Patrick Marber’s revival of The Producers is gloriously brash, deliberately outrageous and uproariously funny, driven by a company that understands precisely how far Mel Brooks’s comedy must be pushed.
The musical, with a book by Mel Brooks and Thomas Meehan and music and lyrics by Brooks, follows once-successful Broadway producer Max Bialystock, now reduced to staging disasters and extracting cheques from wealthy elderly admirers. His latest failure is Funny Boy, an ill-fated musical version of Hamlet whose critics depart before the interval.
Into Max’s dilapidated office walks Leo Bloom, a nervous accountant sent to inspect the books. When Leo casually observes that a producer could make more money from a flop than a hit, Max seizes upon the idea. They will raise far more money than a show requires, stage a guaranteed disaster and keep the surplus once it closes.
Their chosen catastrophe is Springtime for Hitler: A Gay Romp with Adolf and Eva at Berchtesgaden, a reverential Nazi musical written by the unhinged Franz Liebkind. To complete the plan, Max and Leo recruit the worst director they can find, Roger de Bris, whose instinct is to improve the material by making it considerably gayer.
Andy Nyman dominates the evening as Max Bialystock. His Max is oily, desperate, shameless and magnificently theatrical, carrying himself with the wounded grandeur of a man who still regards himself as the King of Broadway, despite all evidence to the contrary.
Nyman throws himself into Max’s schemes with tremendous energy while retaining enough vulnerability to make the character more than a comic predator. Beneath the bluster and manipulation is a man terrified that his glory days have disappeared for good. Nyman’s timing, physicality and ability to hold the audience make Max the production’s driving force.
Marc Antolin provides an ideal counterbalance as Leo Bloom. At first, Leo appears folded into himself, clutching his blue blanket and spiralling into panic whenever Max invades his space. Antolin’s physical comedy is wonderfully precise, particularly during Leo’s nervous collapses, yet he also charts the character’s transformation with real warmth.
I Wanna Be a Producer gives Antolin one of the evening’s strongest musical showcases, allowing Leo’s secret ambition to explode out of the drab accounting office. The partnership between Max and Leo gradually develops into the emotional centre of the story, culminating in the unexpectedly touching ’Til Him.
The elderly investors provide some of the production’s most shocking humour. In the original story, Max’s relationship with them is suggestive, but Marber’s production takes the sexual comedy much further. Max’s encounter with “Hold-Me-Touch-Me” develops into simulated sex, accompanied by increasingly elaborate fantasies involving milkmaids, stable boys, rabbis and contortionists.
It is broad, indecent and extremely funny. At times my sides genuinely ached, while the laughter repeatedly brought tears to my eyes. The production commits to the absurdity so completely that shock quickly gives way to helpless laughter.
Harry Morrison is also hilarious as Franz Liebkind, a wild-eyed devotee of Hitler whose patriotic songs, rooftop pigeons and furious historical grievances are performed with complete sincerity. Franz is quite clearly mad, but Morrison never signals the jokes. His intensity makes them land all the harder.
The production reaches another level of comic extravagance with Trevor Ashley’s Roger de Bris and Raj Ghatak’s Carmen Ghia. Roger is an eccentric, flamboyant director surrounded by a creative team for whom restraint appears to be a personal insult. Ashley generates many of the evening’s funniest moments, turning Roger into a towering monument to theatrical vanity, while Ghatak’s Carmen is deliciously arch, possessive and immaculately disdainful.
Keep It Gay becomes a sustained explosion of camp theatricality. Roger’s household is populated by exaggerated characters, provocative costumes and visual jokes that grow progressively more explicit. One living statue turns around to reveal an enormous dangling prosthetic penis before dancing and gyrating across the stage.
The image is undeniably funny, but it also exposes a curious contradiction in the production’s handling of dated material. The sexuality surrounding the female characters appears comparatively restrained, while the gay male characters are made more explicit and exaggerated for comic shock. There is something inconsistent about softening one form of sexual caricature while enthusiastically amplifying another.
The absurdity carries the scene, and the audience continued laughing, but some spectators may find the overt sexuality startling. One older audience member I spoke to during the interval was clearly shocked by it. This is not a production I would recommend for younger children or anyone expecting the humour to remain at the level of coy innuendo.
Joanna Woodward brings comic assurance and vocal strength to Ulla. When You’ve Got It, Flaunt It introduces her as far more than the blonde fantasy Max and Leo initially perceive. Woodward gives Ulla confidence, intelligence and a clear awareness of the effect she has on both men.
The musical’s great comic detonation is, inevitably, Springtime for Hitler. Swastikas, glitter, jackboots, chorus lines and Broadway spectacle collide in a sequence of breathtakingly organised vulgarity. Roger’s transformation into Hitler turns the intended propaganda into a flamboyant theatrical sensation, and Max and Leo’s guaranteed disaster is interpreted as brilliant satire.
The number works because nobody approaches it cautiously. Marber and choreographer Lorin Latarro inflate fascist imagery until its pomposity collapses under the weight of sequins, dancing and show-business excess. The production does not dignify tyranny with solemnity. It humiliates it with musical theatre.
Some of Brooks’s humour is unquestionably dated, and the production’s attempts to navigate that material are not always consistent. Yet the jokes are distributed so widely, and performed with such energy and affection, that the evening feels driven by comic anarchy rather than cruelty.
The Producers is an unapologetically old-fashioned musical comedy staged with tremendous pace, invention and nerve. It is vulgar, affectionate and uproariously funny, powered by Andy Nyman’s commanding central performance and a supporting company willing to hurl every joke far beyond the boundaries of good taste.
By the final curtain on Friday 10th July, the Garrick audience was on its feet for a full standing ovation. It felt entirely deserved. At the Garrick, failure has rarely looked so triumphant.
Cast & Creatives
- Showing: 30th August 2025 – 19th September 2026
- Venue: Garrick Theatre, 2 Charing Cross Road, London WC2H 0HH
- Buy Tickets: https://thegarricktheatre.co.uk/tickets/mel-brooks-the-producers/
- Book: Mel Brooks and Thomas Meehan
- Music and Lyrics: Mel Brooks
- Director: Patrick Marber
- Original Direction and Choreography: Susan Stroman
- Presented by special arrangement with: StudioCanal
- Choreographer: Lorin Latarro
- Set Designer: Scott Pask
- Costume Designer: Paul Farnsworth
- Lighting Designer: Tim Lutkin
- Sound Designer: Paul Groothuis
- Wigs, Hair and Makeup Designer: Betty Marini
- Photography: Manuel Harlan
- Cast:
Marc Antolin as Leo Bloom
Trevor Ashley as Roger de Bris
Raj Ghatak as Carmen Ghia
Harry Morrison as Franz Liebkind
Joanna Woodward as Ulla
Alex Lodge as Storm Trooper
Kelsie-Rae Marshall as Hold-Me-Touch-Me
Ryan Pidgen as Standby Max
Megan Armstrong as Swing
Marianne Bardgett as Ensemble
Olly Christopher as Swing
Gabrielle Cocca as Swing / Dance Captain
Nolan Edwards as Ensemble
Michael Franks as Ensemble
Matt Gillett as Swing / Resident Director
Esme Kennedy as Ensemble
Sinead Kenny as Ensemble
Josh Kiernan as Ensemble / Assistant Dance Captain
Kate Parr as Ensemble
Emma Robotham-Hunt as Ensemble
Pierce Rogan as Ensemble
Hollie Jane Stephens as Swing / Assistant Dance Captain
Jermaine Woods as Ensemble
Liam Wrate as Swing
An Uproariously Funny Triumph Of Theatrical Bad Taste
-
Overall
Summary
Patrick Marber’s gloriously outrageous revival of The Producers is powered by Andy Nyman’s commanding Max Bialystock, Marc Antolin’s warm comic turn as Leo Bloom, and a company that drives Mel Brooks’s musical farce into dazzling theatrical overdrive.
User Review
( votes)
About author
Add comment