Brush Up Your Goose Step

BRIDGET MONTGOMERY/AP
Road to a hit: Brooks exults in Chicago, where the show had a sellout pre-New York run

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By all accounts, Stroman and Brooks were a smooth-running team, the old Catskills tummler deferring to the surehanded Broadway director--though Brooks attended every rehearsal and made constant suggestions. "He's totally attentive, watching like a hawk," says Broderick. "And he picks up even the subtlest things." The cast got used to the occasional Brooksian outburst--"No, no, you're ruining my masterpiece!" he yelled on arriving at one rehearsal--and to his barrage of (sometimes bad) ideas. In one scene Brooks urged Lane and Broderick to try a bit of physical shtick when they exit the door at the same time. They tried it, then turned around to see what the master thought. "Stinks!" he shouted. They moved on.

One of the toughest parts for Brooks was cutting some favorite bits from the movie. The character of the hippie actor hired to play Hitler (Dick Shawn in the film) was junked as too dated. (Hitler is now played by the show-within-a-show's gay director.) And the movie's ending, with Bloom and Bialystock in prison, has been altered, so that the pair end up winners. What, you were expecting Kafka?

For the real-life Broadway crowd, The Producers is a gift from the show-biz gods. For years, most of the street's big musical hits have been operatic British imports. The Lion King was a great homegrown boost, but Disney and Julie Taymor were, and still are, outsiders. The Producers is a product and a celebration of the kind of musical-comedy showmanship that doesn't exist much anymore. "It's as if this is that one last musical from the 1950s, and everybody forgot to produce it," says one of the show's producers, Tom Viertel. "And now here it is."

For Brooks, the show is about more than that. This onetime combat engineer in the European theater in World War II is still satirizing Hitler, without apologies. "You can't compete with a despot on a soapbox," he notes. "The best thing is to make him ludicrous." And now he may be seeing more of himself in the wacky show-biz satire he wrote more than 30 years ago. "It's the story of a caterpillar who becomes a butterfly--that's Leo Bloom," says Brooks. "And that's me. A little kid from Brooklyn who finally made it across the vast East River to Manhattan, to Broadway. That's a journey that is as great as from the Alleghenies to the Rockies." You made it, Mel.