Theatre
Starry night
Lloyd Evans
The Producers Theatre Royal Dnuy Lane Murderer Menier Chocolate Factory
Frankly, I'd be suspicious. The superlafives that have showered down on The Producers must at some point induce resistance or disbelief. Read the national papers and you'll find the critics in a state of unanimous and frenzied adulation. Which isn't good. Stunned awe and fawning idolatry are not the most helpful of critical conditions. Even if a show is outstanding, readers want a sober estimate of merits and failings, not a narcissistic singalong from a loved-up hippy. But The Producers seems to be different. It's less a musical and more a wonder-drug, unhinging the sane, mesmerising the doubtful, inspiring the morbid, sweetening the bitter, and embracing all-comers in a mood of warmth, radiance and goodwill. Come off it. Something in me recoils at the thought of being transformed into a ranting disciple with varnished eyes and ooze dribbling from my 0-shaped mouth.
Well, I've seen it. And I've survived. And I must say it's a jolly good show. Certainly it surpasses the shrill and patchy film on which it's based. The plot requires Max Bialystock, a crooked producer, to finance his shows by playing gigolo to a harem of shrivelled widows. In a cinema, with the realistic tone of a movie, this notion seems deeply unappetising. But in the musical's dream-world it comes across as painlessly naughty. Lee Evans is heaps funnier than Gene Wilder as the meek and mild accountant, Leopold Bloom. Nathan Lane has had a year or two on Broadway to bring his scheming Max to the absolute peak of perfection. He gets a laugh virtually every time he moves. The superb Conleth Hill, as virile an actor as one could hope to find, is cast against type as the camp stage-director Roger DeBris. He also doubles as an unforgettable mincing Fiihrer. It's a measure of the show's quality that a talent like James Dreyfus is confined to an attendant pansy, a role he carries off with his habitual comic grace. With such a surfeit of stars on stage one might have expected an unsightly bout of 'hogging'. But discipline is maintained. Everyone pulls in the same direction at once. Well, apart from Leigh Zimmerman, whose big'n'bouncy figure pulls in many directions at once.
Mel Brooks's script is both exquisitely tasteless and perfectly inoffensive. He happily lays into subjects usually considered beyond criticism: Jews, gays, mental defectives. The Swedes, too, come in for some light roughing up. But his satirical method is playful and generous and — like The Simpsons — seems to honour the thing it mocks. But is this show truly the greatest phenomenon to reach London since Julius Caesar? Well, I was at the back of the grand circle and the tier of seating above our heads turned the area into a natural echo-chamber. At curtain-down the crowd raptures were so ecstatic I had to plug my ears to stop my hearing going fuzzy. Both index fingers came out covered in gunk. That's never happened to me before.
Murderer by Anthony Shaffer opens with a witty piece of casting. Les Dennis is seen drugging and murdering his young, blonde, cutesy-pie girlfriend. He drags her off into the bathroom and chops her up with a hatchet. The joke is that Les Dennis's stage lover, Sarah Kay, bears a powerful resemblance to Amanda Holden, who a few years back jilted Dennis for someone or other. Good joke, certainly, but not quite enough to sustain the production.
Shaffer's play uses the same techniques as his masterpiece. Sleuth, although the pieces don't fit together quite so neatly and the tale is lacking in dramatic intensity. Les Dennis plays Norman, a misfit artist, whose hobby is researching the lives of murderers. With his wife, and later with his girlfriend, he re-enacts the homicides of Crippen and Christie. But the games go awry, identities are mistaken, and the wrong people end up being drowned in the bath. Les Dennis is a reliable and gifted performer. Indeed, as the programme eagerly reminds us, he has 'guest-presented on This Morning for ITV'. Terrific. But Norman is a macabre weirdo, a dreamer with a perverse imagination who seems irresistibly attractive to a pair of gorgeous blondes. It calls for an actor with more depth and swagger, and more sexual charisma than Mr Family Fortunes. The script is seriously showing its age. '0 my sainted aunt Harry!' gasps Sarah Kay at one point, a line as quaint as anything in Congreve. Only when Caroline Langrishe glides on as the spurned and slinky wife does the production start to crackle.
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