A New Mel Brooks Musical. Adapted by Mel Brooks and Thomas Meehan from Brooks’ 1968 film of the same name, with lyrics by Brooks and music by Brooks and Glen Kelly. As in the film, the story concerns two theatrical producers who scheme to get rich by overselling interests in a Broadway flop. Complications arise when the show unexpectedly turns out to be successful.
The original production opened on Broadway on April 19, 2001, starring Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick, and ran for 2,502 performances, winning a record-breaking 12 Tony Awards. It spawned a successful London production running for three years, national tours, many productions internationally and a 2005 film version.
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, 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.
| 2001 | Broadway |
Original Broadway Production Broadway |
| 2002 | US Tour |
1st National Tour US Tour |
| 2003 | US Tour |
2nd National Tour US Tour |
| 2003 | Canada |
Toronto Production Canada |
| 2004 | West End |
London Production West End |
| 2006 | Las Vegas |
Las Vegas |
| 2007 | Lincolnshire, IL (Regional) |
Regional Premiere Lincolnshire, IL (Regional) |
| 2024 | West End |
West End |
| 2025 | West End |
West End |
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