Mel Brooks knew who to credit when he collected a record 12 Tonys for the stage version of The Producers.

Michael Ellison
Guardian

Tuesday June 5, 2001

Poking fun at Jews; taking a rise out of gays, blacks, Germans and the Irish; re-inventing little old ladies as nymphomaniacs: none of these testaments to the politically incorrect impeded the progress of the musical The Producers to a record 12 Tony awards for Broadway theatre on Sunday night.

These qualities, rather, contribute to the phenomenon created around a show that is Broadway's biggest hit in more than 25 years - one that had established a critic-proof momentum even before it opened.

Twelve Tonys, the maximum the show could win, would normally guarantee a surge at the box-office, but The Producers is beyond that already. It took $17m in advance sales before its run started in April, another $3m the night the curtain went up at the St James Theatre and has soaked up at least another $1m a week since then. You need to go back to A Chorus Line in 1975 to find a fuss like it. Each day people line up for hours on end for the only tickets available, which allow them to stand up in the theatre for another two hours and 55 minutes; last week a pair of tickets were said to have changed hands for $1,000.

Not even the price of admittance, which rose mysteriously to $100 - the highest on Broadway - on opening night could tarnish the production's lustre. It has been described as an equal opportunities offender, a rejoinder to the dominance of bland Disney fare and is credited with putting a little of New York back into a city that became safer and more sanitised in the 1990s.

And yet, before its out-of-town run began in Chicago in February, this was simply a musical based on a 1968 Mel Brooks movie of the same name, and only a cult success at that - hardly the regular profile for a potential blockbuster on the stage.

"Everybody in this country is so afraid to make a move that isn't politically correct," said the playwright Neil Simon in a recent interview. "Back in the 1960s there were lots of things like this around, lots of comedies. But now it's a desert."

Brooks did his best to provide a little more parodic irrigation as he appeared three times at Radio City Music Hall to accept awards. "I want to thank Hitler for being such a funny guy on stage," he said, running a comb along his upper lip in a gesture that could scarcely lay much claim to originality.

People, he said, would try anything to secure a ticket. "I've never met so many Jews in my life who say they are my relatives. I don't know who these people are - get out of my life. I'm so thrilled about this. Never in my life did I think this could happen. It's enough to make you believe in God."

God's name is normally invoked with more seriousness by winners of events such as the football Super Bowl, while mere legends are fawned over at the Grammys. God's part in the success of Hello Dolly, the previous holder of the Tonys record - 10 prizes in 1964 - is not recorded.

The pre-eminence of The Producers was such that one winner from another show - yes, there were a few - accepted his award almost as though it were a brief diversion from the real business at hand.

"There must be some mistake, I had nothing to do with The Producers," said Daniel Sullivan, director of Proof (best play, director and leading actress), about a young genius who fears that she will develop her father's mental illness as well as his flair for figures.

Brooks's musical about a musical, with two creeps trying to stage Broadway's biggest disaster of all time - Springtime for Hitler - swept up the trophies for: best musical; book of a musical (Brooks and Thomas Meehan); original score for the theatre (Brooks); direction of a musical (Susan Stroman); leading actor in a musical (Nathan Lane); scenic design (Robin Wagner); costume design (William Ivey Long); lighting design (Peter Kaczorowski); choreography (Stroman); orchestration (Doug Besterman); featured actor in a musical (Gary Beach) and featured actress in a musical (Cady Huffman).

All this put Broadway and the Tonys on the front pages of every New York morning newspaper yesterday - a rarity for an event that is generally regarded as an indigent relation of the Oscars, broadcast by the CBS networks almost as an act of charity. Movie studios, entertainment magazines and even relatively humble people who have appeared in front of no lens other than that of the family camcorder organise parties to coincide with the Academy awards ceremony.

The more likely question about the Tonys show is whether anyone watched it outside big cities such as New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. This year, though, the Tonys made a determined assault on the big league, with Gwyneth Paltrow in the front row, Edie Falco, one of the stars of The Sopranos, presenting a prize and - feeding pre-emptively on the success to come - The Producers' two leads, Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick, acting as co-hosts of the evening.

With the Brooks show taking all before it, the musical version of The Full Monty was in receipt of a remarkable achievement of its own: 10 nominations, no prizes. But Tom Stoppard's reading of the life of the poet AE Housman, The Invention of Love, was not overlooked: Richard Easton won the Tony for best leading actor and Robert Sean Leonard was best featured actor.

The Tonys are taken as an index of the health of the theatre in New York when, in fact, they address only a small proportion of what is going on. Only the shows in about 40 theatres are considered, and their designation as Broadway venues is determined not by proximity to the Great White Way but rather by capacity, ie, whether they have more than 500 seats. That means that 300 theatres are excluded.

Still, this year's season, which officially ended last week, makes its case with the figures from the box office. Audiences were up to nearly 12 million, a 5% improvement on the previous year, and they paid $665.4m for their pleasures. More than half of the shows charge $85 or more for the best tickets and the average price has reached an estimated $55.73. But none of this matters much to The Producers, which transcends the Broadway norm in every conceivable way, and even contradicts one of its most celebrated maxims: "Never put your own money in a show."

Courtesy of the Guardian.
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