Ruffles and Flourishes

Asheville Community Theatre
The Producers
Book by Mel Brooks and Thomas Meehan; Music and Lyrics by Mel Brooks
Through September 10, 2017
Asheville Community Theatre, 35 E. Walnut St. Asheville, NC 28801


Max Bialystock is a flamboyant but failing Broadway producer whose latest disaster, Funny Boy, a musical based on Hamlet, closes the night it opens. The next day, a nebisshy accountant, Leo Bloom, comes to audit his books and makes an offhand remark. Financial discrepancies on Broadway, he says, are less likely to be discovered with a failure than a success.

Inspired, Max concocts a cockamamie scheme.  Find a play guaranteed to flop after one night.  Lure investors to put up more money than needed. Instead of returning the overage, the new team of Bialystock and Bloom will abscond to Rio with the cash.

But the plan backfires when their show, a tasteless musical called Springtime for Hitler, is a hit.  The duo end up in prison, where they’re at it again, producing another tasteless musical with the inmates, Prisoners of Love.

That was the zany premise of Mel Brooks’s The Producers, his 1967 cult classic film with Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder. Brooks later took the zaniness to inflatio-ad-ridiculum proportions in the  2001 Broadway musical, also The Producers, with Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick.

Now Asheville Community Theatre is inaugurating its renovated auditorium with its homegrown version of The Producers through September 17. It’s a spanking start for its snazzy new space.

Sticking pins

Brooks’s writing strategy with The Producers was to impale every convention of the Broadway musical as he did with his movie genre satires Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein.

And he would stick giant comedy pins in the biggest voodoo doll of all time, Adolph Hitler.

The show was giddy with Broadway musical clichés.  Fast-talking con man, dirty old ladies, blonde bombshell secretary, the worm who turns to wolf, comic partners-in-crime, mincing theatre director, mincing chorus boys, butch lady techie, overbearing capitalist boss, beaten-down worker cogs-in-the-machine, Irish cops. 

And enough Jewish jokes to reopen Grossingers.

The entire package was wrapped in a lascivious leer of such exuberance that it attained an innocent charm. “The Stripper” played by harp, celeste, and kazoo. 

The staging strategy of his Broadway crew—director, designers, choreographer—was likewise over the top.  The production’s motto was clearly Oscar Wilde’s “Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.”

The characterizations, sets, costumes, and dances were Macy’s Thanksgiving Day inflatables blown so tight they could either explode in confetti and fireworks or break loose from earthly ropes and float to heaven.  On Broadway, they sometimes did both.

The creative team crammed in so many allusions to Broadway and Hollywood it would take a theatre historian a week to footnote them all:  Follies, Gypsy, Auntie Mame, Fiddler on the Roof, A Chorus Line, Cabaret, 42 Street, The Music Man, Busby Berkeley, the June Taylor Dancers, the Ziegfield Follies, Hellzappopin’, Olsen and Johnson, Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, Judy Garland, vaudeville, burlesque, all the way back to The Black Crook.

A-team ensemble

Without a Broadway-size house and a Broadway budget, ACT and the director of The Producers, Asheville’s formidable musicals maven Jerry Crouch, had to be selective in what he stowed in the overhead compartment. He couldn’t pack, or unpack, all the inside gags that Brooks stuffed into his script. Fortunately Crouch had an A-team of comics, singers, and dancers to take onboard.

Crouch, his choreographers, Shari Azar and Tina Pisano-Poor, and his music director, Lynda Shuler, meld this cast of twenty-seven community theatre veterans, professionals, and professionals-in-training into a tight, bright ensemble. This is one of the best talent-and-experience mixes I’ve seen at ACT.  Like artists blending paint, Crouch and collaborators let the company’s verve feather out individual rough edges.

Shuler gets a big Broadway sound from her ten-person orchestra. It’s a shame we don’t see them. They were out of sight in a covered pit. I first thought we were hearing a recording. What’s the point of live theatre, if we don’t see the performers live? This is a place where those awkward side-stages could have been used to some advantage. Otherwise, they’re a neck-craning nuisance.   

It doesn’t help that ACT’s new sound system still hasn’t solved the problem of tracking the performers' locations on the stage. 

There were some stand-outs in this energetic group (not all of whom are well identified in the program). Alix Likens is a gangbusters Ulla, the sexpot Swedish showgirl-secretary, who manages to paint Bialystock and Bloom’s shabby office completely white during a long intermission. Jeff Stone is übertrieben as Franz Liebkind, the pigeon-raising, gun-totin’, accident-prone German immigrant playwright who has written the love-letter to Hitler that B&B aim to produce.  (He claims never to have been a Nazi: “I vos only following orders,” he tells them, “I didn't even know there vos a vor on. Ve lived in the back, right across from Schvitzerland.“)

With some solid show-biz background, Likens and Stone radiate polish and pizzazz.  Cord Scott as the shamelessly camp Carmen Ghia, “common-law assistant” to the just as shameless Roger de Bris (Corey Link), the Springtime for Hitler director, gets to show off his accomplished jetés.  And Frank Salvo, as an uncredited secretary to the head of Leo’s accounting firm, should get jail time for serious scene-stealing.

Matthew Harper, a theatre student at Warren Wilson College making his ACT debut, sweetly embodies Leo Bloom’s ingratiating schlemiel. He makes us yearn for him to go full out as a comic performer and a song-and-dance man when Bloom blossoms into a producer and Ulla’s beau. As Max might have sung, “He can do it.”  

Zacary Landolt as Max appears to be channeling Grouch Marx.  I hope as the production moves along (I saw it the second night), the dialogue coach, Carole Saich, can help him get the mush out of his mouth so we can understand his words. The costume designer, Carina Lopez, can also help by figuring out how to keep his pants up and his shirt tucked in. 

Despite this and a few other easily corrected  lapses in costume technique, Lopez’s wardrobe has a finely-tuned palette and snappy silhouettes. She gets the big costume picture of subtly coordinating colors, patterns, and textures. If her Springtime for Hitler chorines don’t have the outrageousness of North Carolina native William Ivey Long’s showgirls on Broadway, whose could?  (Ida Bostian, on the costume construction crew, knows Long from the honorary degree awarded to him by UNC Asheville, Lopez’s alma mater. She might have given Lopez some hints about ramping up the ridiculous.)

Another UNC Asheville alum, Jill Summers, ACT’s accomplished technical director, deftly maneuvers eleven locales on and off ACT’s shallow stage. Despite the renovation, the stage hasn’t been given a better configuration and still appears to operate without much in the way of wings and flies.  Will this be a continual hindrance to a theatre which plans to dedicate its main platform to musicals? 

As Summers gets accustomed to her new stage, her college mentors, Rob Berls and Rob Bowen (the lighting designer for The Producers) may encourage her to think beyond travelers and painted flats strung out along that long horizontal.

In the end, however, audiences will rightly overlook these fluffs and focus on the flourishes. This Producers flourishes indeed. It is an ACT triumph that will have theatregoers, as it did me, sitting back and beaming.

Arnold Wengrow is the author of The Designs of Santo Loquasto, a chronicle of the set and costume designer's work on Broadway, Off Broadway, for dance, opera, and the movies, including thirty films by Woody Allen.

Info at http://ashevilletheatre.org/
Photograph by MISHA Photography