From the WSJ Opinion Archives
LEISURE & ARTS
Bye Bye, Borscht Belt
"The Producers" is a comedy genre's last gasp.
NEW YORK--The big news on Broadway is the announcement that Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick, who created the roles of Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom in the musical-comedy version of Mel Brooks's 1968 movie "The Producers," will return to the show for 14 weeks starting Dec. 30. A year ago, that would have been news because "The Producers" was still Broadway's hottest ticket, the musical everyone was talking about. Now, it's news because "The Producers" is sorely in need of artificial respiration. Last week, the show played to only 69% capacity.
Some observers blame the show's decline on weak replacements for Messrs. Lane and Broderick, others on the fact that the best seats at the St. James Theatre are reserved for premium buyers willing to shell out a staggering $480 apiece. Both reasons are plausible, but neither quite hits the mark. The real reason why "The Producers" is sagging like a dowager's bosom is that it, too, is out of date--albeit gloriously so.
What struck me about "The Producers" when I first saw it was how unabashedly old-fashioned it seemed, from the right-between-the-eyes overture to the Milton-Berlesque acting. It stands to reason that the show should be old-fashioned, its creator having been born in 1926, but it occurred to me that what I was witnessing was not so much a new musical as the last gasp of a dying comic language. Strip away the naughty words and self-consciously outré production numbers and "The Producers" is nothing more (or less) than a virtuoso reminiscence of the lapel-grabbing, kill-for-a-laugh shtickery on which so much of the stand-up comedy of my youth was based.
Much of that comedy was explicitly Jewish, as is "The Producers" itself, in which Yiddish slang is constantly popping up, even in Mr. Brooks's lyrics. Back when I was a small-town Missouri boy, such borscht belt humor had the crisp tang of the unfamiliar, which was part of what made it so funny. But most Jewish comics assimilated long ago, as was proved beyond doubt by the colossal success of "Seinfeld," that least overtly ethnic of sitcoms. Jerry and his friends shed their parents' accents and became cool and ironic and put the past behind them . . . and now it's gone, never to return.
To see "The Producers" is to be immersed in that older style of comedy, and for anyone born before 1960, the experience will be as nostalgic as a trip to the county fair. Somehow I doubt that was what Mr. Brooks had in mind, though. My guess is that he still thinks it's titillating, even shocking, to put swishy Nazis on stage. It's no accident that he hasn't made a movie for years and years: Broadway is one of the last places in America where he could draw a crowd with that kind of humor, and it's not an especially young crowd, either.
So where is the American musical headed? I see two likely paths. One is to simple-minded "jukebox" shows like "Mamma Mia!" whose scores are drawn from cheery pop hits of the baby-boom era. The other is to fresher shows like the wickedly funny "Avenue Q," which is deliberately aimed at a much younger demographic. "Avenue Q" is every bit as outrageous as "The Producers" (where else can you see two puppets having sex on stage?), but its language, both verbal and musical, is wholly contemporary. It's hipper than "The Producers," not to mention faster, snarkier and--yes--better.
My guess is that "The Producers" probably won't stay open much past April 4, when its once and future stars are set to depart, presumably for good. I'll be sorry to see it go, if not surprised. "It is a great danger for everyone when what is shocking changes," says a character in Graham Greene's "Our Man in Havana." It can also be sad, and even touching. Sure, "The Producers" is delightful, but whoever thought its once-scandalous creator would spend his sunset years being delightful? Had you suggested such a thing in 1974, back when "Blazing Saddles" was raising eyebrows, I'd have said, "I should live so long." Well, I did--and so did Mel Brooks.
Mr. Teachout is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal. He blogs about the arts at www.terryteachout.com.
