I think that, at best, there's a limited pool of people you could cast, because you could never really do it without Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick. You can reinterpret Rose, you can do something new with the Emcee, there are even nuances in Tevye if you look hard enough, but these parts are like Streisand and Fanny Brice -- anyone else who does Funny Girl is living in Barbra's shadow, and that's just the truth.
And I'm not saying that as a purist. Jason Alexander, who played Max in L.A. and has talked about it at length, makes a similar point whenever he talks about it; he still acts like he's the outlier in not outright loving The Producers which ain't the case today (if it ever was), but aside from that, what he said really struck a chord, and it's informed how I view the show ever since I heard it.
He said he saw it with Lane and Broderick, he loved it -- in fact, preferred it to the source movie, which really is an outlier opinion -- but recognized its flaws (at least as far as he was concerned), and because of that he turned to his manager and wife who were with him and said, "Somewhere, some day, some time, they're gonna ask me to do this... would you please remind me that I don't want to do this show?" The reason was that he was, first and foremost (at least in his own mind), an actor, not a comedian, regardless of the kind of roles that became his mainstay; with The Producers, there was no subtext, no depth, that he could plumb. Like Spamalot, it was just the jokes, and jokes written in Mel Brooks' style at that.
His summation of the piece itself was what hit me:
"It's not a very good show. If you look at it, it's old jokes -- really old jokes -- and kind of mediocre songs. However, it was directed magnificently by Susan Stroman, and what she created was an opportunity for a bunch of actors that understand vaudeville/burlesque to have a field day. But you must lift that show up, you must infuse those jokes, you must make something out of those songs, and I'm here to tell ya... it's heavy lifting. [...] because it is jokes... jokes... there's not a lot of leeway in how to tell them. If you're gonna do the show [without ad-libbing and playing games with each other, as Nathan and Matthew did], you kinda have to tell those jokes the same way every time. The nice thing about the theater, when you really understand it, is... everyone says 'Oh, you have to do the same thing every night!' Well, you do but you don't; you're doing the same material, but you're having an exploration process every night. Not in The Producers. There's not a lot of ways to say 'I'M WEARING A CARDBOARD BELT!' [...] if you want to get the laugh. So it was more straight repetition, more mindless repetition, and in a lot of ways, it was not a fun gig."
That's what's so hard about dream casting for this thread, funnily enough, now that I have that stuck in my head. I wanna contribute, but I have no idea who would do something genuinely different with it, or if they even could.
Formerly gvendo2005
Broadway Legend
joined: 5/1/05
Blocked: After Eight, suestorm, david_fick, emlodik, lovebwy, Dave28282, joevitus, BorisTomashevsky, Seb28
