When You Got It, Flaunt It!
Don’t be misled by the lackluster cover art for the original motion picture soundtrack CD of The Producers; the recording itself is terrific and bodes well for the quality of the movie itself, which is due to open on December 16. (I caught a coming attraction for it at the Ziegfeld recently when I went to see Rent for the second time, and the audience response was highly enthusiastic, so that’s another good sign.)
This recording makes good on the tremendous hype contained in the accompanying press release from Sony Classical. (Why the soundtrack of a brassy Broadway musical should be on a “classical” label is a discussion for another day.) Sony notes that the CD features Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick “in their acclaimed definitive performances, honed by hundreds of hilarious live performances and preserved for ever [sic] on celluloid.” It goes on to tell us that “the delightful Uma Thurman makes a spectacular screen musical debut, singing and dancing as the sexy secretary Ulla,” that “Will Ferrell virtually hijacks the movie with his uproarious turn as the deranged, singing and dancing Nazi playwright Franz Liebkind,” and that the soundtrack recording “surpasses the cast album sonically, echoing the bold and luxurious sound of the classic Hollywood musicals of the golden age, featuring a bigger orchestra and chorus recreating Mel Brooks’ hilarious, affectionate score in sparkling, big-scale new orchestrations created for the film by Tony winner Doug Besterman and produced for the soundtrack in state-of-the-art sound.”
All of this is true, or true enough. Vocally, Lane and Broderick are at the top of their form as Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom. Despite what it says in the press release, hundreds of stage performances can sometimes lead to a lack of spontaneity when a stars recreate their Broadway roles on screen — but, judging from the soundtrack, that certainly doesn’t seem to be the case here. Likewise, Gary Beach sounds fresh as a daisy in repeating his Tony Award-winning stage turn as the loony Roger DeBris, and Roger Bart — who has since become a TV star via Desperate Housewives — is as hysterically funny as he was on Broadway in the outrageously flamboyant role of Carmen Ghia. Thurman is indeed a funny, seductive charmer as Ulla, singing well enough that the mind reels when imagining the other screen musicals in which she might be cast. (How about that Damn Yankees remake?) Ferrell is a riot as Franz, and — yes, yes, yes! — the lush orchestrations of the soundtrack are beyond fabulous.
As for the score, it is what it is. Several observers have correctly pointed out that, to a large degree, Brooks’ melodies are derivative and his lyrics trite. (That goes double for the new song that he wrote expressly for the movie, “There’s Nothing Like a Show on Broadway.”) Though I fully agree, this doesn’t seem to me a fatal flaw in the show or the film, because (1) the fact that The Producers is deliberately and unashamedly old-fashioned in many respects goes a long way toward mitigating such criticism, and (2) some of the lyrics are so funny that they make it rather easy to forgive the terribly clichéd sections.
P.C. Alert: The lyrics “Oh, I debits all duh mornin’ an’ I credits all duh eb’nin until dem ledgers be right,” sung by a black accountant in the “I Wanna Be a Producer” number on stage, have been deleted from the soundtrack CD and presumably from the movie itself. The hallmark of this show as seen on Broadway and elsewhere is that it’s an equal opportunity offender, bult on hilarious jokes at the expense of Jews, gays, blacks, women, Germans, old people, and so on. In offending everyone, it theoretically offends no one. But it seems that someone or some group of people in Hollywood decided that allowing the white folks behind The Producers to make fun of African-Americans in the big-budget motion picture version would be pushing the envelope a little too far — although, conversely, it’s okay in some people’s eyes to have movies with titles like White Men Can’t Jump. (The problem with this, as South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker said in a recent interview, is that as soon as you exempt one person, race, sex, religion, or ideology from ridicule, you make a value judgment that calls into question your jibes at everything else.)
One other aspect of the CD is cause for some trepidation: “The King of Broadway,” Max’s first number in the stage show, is placed at the end of the disc as a bonus track because it was cut from the film. Given that the number establishes Max’s character in song very early on the proceedings, its excision sounds like a bad idea. Of course, we’ll have to see the movie before we can make a firm judgment on this — and, I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to see it!
