The Producers West End Reviews

What director Patrick Marber and choreographer Lorin Latarro did so well at the Menier was to put on a large scale production in a very small space. At the Garrick, they have the space (and budget) to really let their ideas shine. The tap routine in ...

What director Patrick Marber and choreographer Lorin Latarro did so well at the Menier was to put on a large scale production in a very small space. At the Garrick, they have the space (and budget) to really let their ideas shine. The tap routine in "I Wanna Be A Producer" is given the expanse it needs to be a real spectacle and "Keep It Gay" is an absolute riot of characters and colour.

The verbal wit is matched with visual élan. Choreographer Lorin Latarro honours the Fiddler-ish pastiche of Bialystock’s opening number with preposterously prancing shtetl figures while Liebkind’s swastika-daubed, puppeteered pigeons bob hilario...

The verbal wit is matched with visual élan. Choreographer Lorin Latarro honours the Fiddler-ish pastiche of Bialystock’s opening number with preposterously prancing shtetl figures while Liebkind’s swastika-daubed, puppeteered pigeons bob hilariously in sync. A surreal highlight is the mock tap-routine by rows of Zimmer-clacking old lady-investors.

The Producers has come back to the West End just at the right time, offering a giant slab of feel-good escapism and genuine hilarity when such things feel in short supply. And in Marber, it has found the perfect steward, a director with comedy in his...

The Producers has come back to the West End just at the right time, offering a giant slab of feel-good escapism and genuine hilarity when such things feel in short supply. And in Marber, it has found the perfect steward, a director with comedy in his fingertips and the intellectual heft to ensure it retains all of its anarchic spirit. Whether you’re a fan of the 1967 screen original or a newcomer, it’s got plenty of pleasures to flaunt.

This feels like the show we need right now: a comedy that holds nothing sacred except the right to hold nothing sacred. Marber, the choreographer Lorin Latarro and the costume designer Paul Farnsworth blend spectacle, discipline and daftness. The cho...

This feels like the show we need right now: a comedy that holds nothing sacred except the right to hold nothing sacred. Marber, the choreographer Lorin Latarro and the costume designer Paul Farnsworth blend spectacle, discipline and daftness. The chorus are supremely well drilled, whether doing a tap routine with Zimmer frames or sieg-heiling their way through the luridly awful show-within-a-show that gives us a Führer arriving in gold lamé on a golden chariot. Who was Hitler, the show seems to ask, except another deluded dreamer? Just with the world’s worst dream.

Only a true misery guts could pick faults in Patrick Marber’s revival of Mel Brooks’s The Producers. Expanded in scale and transferred from a run at the Menier Chocolate Factory last Christmas, it delivers one belly laugh after another. And still...

Only a true misery guts could pick faults in Patrick Marber’s revival of Mel Brooks’s The Producers. Expanded in scale and transferred from a run at the Menier Chocolate Factory last Christmas, it delivers one belly laugh after another. And still, there is so much more to this production than good, old-fashioned tomfoolery. Sewn together with an unceasing ability to laugh at itself, it is a musical as radical and joyously subversive as when it first appeared on film in 1967.

Marber is, of course, well regarded as a playwright and director, but his roots are in comedy, the genre where he cut his teeth. He saturates this slick musical comedy with a wealth of physical gags, exquisitely timed double takes and an expertly jud...

Marber is, of course, well regarded as a playwright and director, but his roots are in comedy, the genre where he cut his teeth. He saturates this slick musical comedy with a wealth of physical gags, exquisitely timed double takes and an expertly judged sense of the absurd that enhances the show’s momentum. This is amplified by Lorin Latarro’s adventurous choreography, which draws on several Broadway tropes with the same sense of mischief as Brooks’ indomitable score. Add to this Scott Pask’s clever composite set and Paul Farnsworth’s inventive, colourful costume designs, and the production seems to have found its natural home in the West End.

Once again, I was hugely entertained by the well-endowed living statue, the latex-masked gimp and the sexy Jesus in De Bris’s apartment. There are brilliant touches I don’t remember from the Menier: the close relationship between Franz and one of...

Once again, I was hugely entertained by the well-endowed living statue, the latex-masked gimp and the sexy Jesus in De Bris’s apartment. There are brilliant touches I don’t remember from the Menier: the close relationship between Franz and one of his antisemitic pigeons, dancers emulating the Reichstag fire, a backdrop of swastikas picked out in pastel roses for the show-within-a-show’s titular anthem. In that number, as has become traditional, Mel Brooks’s recorded voice delivers the line: “Don’t be stoopid, be a smarty/Come and join the Nazi Party!”