Spring is Here, Spring is Here

The daffs are out and all about
The springtime fills the air
The earth makes room for golden bloom
Of flowers bright and fair

And all around is heard the sound
Of bird-call sweet and strange
As folks go by they raise the cry
"Ooh, don't it make a change!"

That's a roundabout way of posting on a new musical to hit the West End. And if I were to discuss a show, well it might as well be Spring Awakening. My hunch is that it's not quite as radical as some people make out. The idea is that in a traditional musical the songs try to arise naturally out of the story. With Spring Awakening the songs make a deliberate break. One minute everyone's acting all 19th century, the next they're singing, like, so totally modern slang, yeah?

But, musically speaking, this is missing the point. Oklahoma doesn't have Oklahoman folk music. My Fair Lady doesn't have mock Edwardian parlour songs. And the gritty, urban, street-wise tragedy that is West Side Story has a symphonic score composed by a posh, classical conductor. The point is that the musical style has always been at odds with the setting. What's really important is whether it's musically appropriate to the drama. The characters in Spring Awakening are frustrated teenagers and they sing like frustrated teenagers so it works just fine. Admittedly, the leap from 19th-century Germany to 21st-century American pop culture is bigger than that from Oklahoma to Broadway. But the difference is one of extent, not form.

So I'm not convinced that Spring Awakening, for all its success, is going to turn everything on its head and usher in a new beginning. Besides if you really want to hear what's getting the kids into the theatre these days, you only have to look at this.

REVIEW: The Producers, Original Cast Recording

Here's a review I wrote a few years back not long after the show began its run in the West End. It's still one of the best nights I've spent in a darkened theatre.

It’s impossible to make a level-headed assessment of The Producers. By the time a chorus line of all-singing, all-dancing Nazi storm troopers start high-kicking their way through a Busby Berkely-style routine in swastika formation, level-headedness has already picked up his jacket and phoned for a taxi. you either love this or just don’t get it. I really, really love it.

This kind of thing might not be to everyone’s taste but its certainly keeping Mel Brooks in a comfortable retirement. The show was a runaway success when it opened in New York and now looks as though it will emulate that success in London. Just don’t expect it to play Berlin any time soon.

Adapted from the 1968 film starring Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder, The Producers is about down-on-his-luck impresario, Max Bialystock, who teams up with wimpy accountant, Leo Bloom. Together they hit on a scheme where they can make more money with a flop than with a hit. So they scam their investors, find the world’s worst playwright, hire the world’s worst director and put on “Springtime for Hitler - a musical romp with Eva and Adolph”. Unfortunately the show becomes an accidental triumph and the two producers wind up commiserating their success: “Oh, we knew we couldn’t lose/Half the audience were Jews…where did we go right?”.

The film was something of a cult hit but, with the Broadway version, The Producers found its spiritual home. Mel Brooks is a man soaked to the marrow in Broadway musicals. His score is pure, adoring parody, from splashy production numbers (“I Wanna Be a Producer”) to Old World operetta (“In Old Bavaria”) to the Negro spiritual yearnings of a black bank clerk:

Oh, I debit’s all duh mornin’
An’ I credits all duh eb’nin’
Until dem ledgers be right!

Even if you don’t know “Old Man River”, that’s still worth a laugh. Sure, there are a few subtleties from the stage show that you miss if you’re just listening to the CD.

The lovely Cole Porter-esque song “That Face” takes on a different shade of meaning when Max starts singing it to the rear end of Ulla, his Swedish secretary. In “Keep It Gay” you miss the choreographer with a pair of rugby socks down the front of his pants and the lesbian in dungarees with the false moustache. Subtleties like that. But there’s still more than enough to love in the recording. The two leads are dynamite. Matthew Broderick’s sweetly earnest voice acts as a perfect counterpoint to Nathan Lane’s bluster and bravado. The brilliant orchestrations capture the sound and soul of a glorious Broadway tradition.

The Producers is also a reminder of the Jewishness at the heart of that tradition. Its not just the Yiddish references (“She Shtupps to Conquer!”) and the spoofs of Fiddler on the Roof, but something more fundamental than that. When the big showstopper of the score comes along, it’s as Jewish as chicken soup:

Springtime for Hitler and Germany
Winter for Poland and France

The pattern of that couplet is straight out of the Psalms: the first line says one thing, the second line turns it around to reinforce the point. You can pass this off as nothing more than meaningless shtick and, to be fair, you’d have a point. Is there really any sense in looking for meaning in a show that includes a crazy German who sings the Fuhrer’s favourite tune, “Der Guten Tag Hop-Clop”, to the accompaniment of a cooing chorus of pigeons and thinks that Adolf’s middle name was Elizabeth? But, without pressing the point too far, there is a deep irony in the merciless ridiculing of Hitler with the most Jewish of art forms, the Broadway musical. It may be crude, rude, vulgar and crass but, by God, is it funny. And the devil cannot stand to be mocked.

The film version - that is, not the original film but the film of the musical of the film - came out a few years later but was something a disappointment. It gave us a lovely memory of the stage show but didn't do much in its own right. They opened up the "I Wanna Be a Producer" number with a big staircase and a gaggle of leggy blondes and they threw in some unnecessary location shots for decoration. But really they might as well have just set up a camera in the theatre. Still you have to love those singing pigeons.

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What makes up
The perfect show?
Not too high,
And not too low...

...a look at musicals from a middling perspective.