A HITLER HIT HITS OGUNQUIT

Mel Brooks’s gloriously audacious musical
remains impossible to kill

The Producers

Just as novelists love to write about writers and filmmakers love to make films about Hollywood, Broadway loves shows about Broadway and its people. According to The Producers, that includes lots of Jews, gay people, elderly women, and thieving, lying fraudsters, i.e., producers.

On the 25th anniversary of the Broadway production (book by Mel Brooks and Thomas Meehan; music and lyrics by Brooks; original direction and choreography by Susan Stroman, recreated by James Gray), the iconic show comes to the historic Ogunquit Playhouse in southern Maine, where a sold-out crowd could hardly have been more delighted by Brooks’s gleeful bad taste.

The Producers begins on the opening (and closing) night of “Funny Boy,” a reinterpretation of Hamlet and the latest flop from Max Bialystock (a delightfully crude Jason Kravits). As the departing audience declares it the worst show in town, Max looks back on his glory days in “The King of Broadway,” a klezmer-inflected production number with high-stepping cops, nuns, and panhandlers.

Dan De Luca and Jason Kravits

When his timid, sexually repressed accountant Leo Bloom (charmingly adorable Dan DeLuca) notices a discrepancy between Max’s income and outlay for his latest production, he muses aloud about a scheme that would allow a producer to keep all the funds he raises should a production fail to turn a profit. Thrilled at the idea, Max talks Leo into quitting his accounting firm to aid him in producing a flop.

Max’s angels—his financial backers—are a group of little old ladies. Max is the devilish fulfiller of their sexual and romantic fantasies, taking on roles like a randy stable boy seducing an innocent milkmaid in exchange for generous checks. Max raises two million dollars from his adoring angels, whose courtship of Max climaxes in a dance number with walkers, and he and Leo set about looking for the worst script they can find.

Dan DeLuca

Once they find the script for “Springtime for Hitler,” written by Franz Liebkind (John Rapson), an unrepentant Nazi hiding out in Greenwich Village, they are on their way, certain that failure is within reach. They hire a Swedish blonde, Ulla (Stephanie Gibson, a little too heavy on the accent, but otherwise impressive), assuming she will be incompetent, yet easy on the eyes.

Faith Jordan Candino, Jason Kravits, and Liesl Landegger

Max hires Roger De Bris (John Scherer), the worst director he can find on Broadway. De Bris is swishingly supported by his assistant Carmen Ghia (Nathan Lee Graham). In pursuit of a Tony, De Bris and his garishly garbed creative team set about envisioning a tasteless celebration of Nazi ideology and aggression (“springtime for Hitler and Germany / winter for Poland and France”). But audiences and critics are unpredictable, so Max and Leo find themselves with a hit on their hands and a financial liability they cannot meet.

Jason Kravits, Stephanie Gibson, and Dan DeLuca

I find the musical far, far better than Brooks’s 1967 screen version of The Producers, but his particular brand of revenge was already there: reducing the ideology of the “master race” to kitsch, camp, and spectacular bad taste. Jewish artists had been ridiculing Hitler and the Nazis since the war itself—Ernst Lubitsch’s audacious To Be or Not to Be did so in 1942—but Brooks pushed that mockery to gleefully outrageous extremes. Thank God for Mel Brooks—who turned 100 this summer—for offering a model for the mockery required of all of us today.

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photos by Nile Scott Studios

The Producers
Ogunquit Playhouse
10 Main St. in Ogunquit, Maine
ends on Sept. 26, 2026
2 hours and 30 minutes, including intermission
for tickets, visit Ogunquit Playhouse

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