GET it while you can. ‘Springtime for Hitler’ and other sequinned showstoppers are segued brilliantly by Cecilian Musical Society in their run of ‘The Producers’ at Lime Tree Theatre.
How riotously dazzling is it? Scan Mel Brooks’ prescient script for the reviews garnered by Max Bialystock (Dickie Donnelly, gifted) and Leopold Bloom (Jason Ronan, touching) for their hit on Broadway, a camp ode to Hitler that was to bomb the producers into financial salvation. Brooks says it far better than this hack can:
MAN (to his friend): Hysterical, absolutely hysterical.
MAN’S FRIEND: I thought I’d split my sides.
DE BRIS, the Springtime director (ecstatic): Congratulations! Have you seen the reviews? Have you seen the lines at the box office? It’s a torrent, it’s an avalanche, it’s the biggest hit on Broadway!
MAX, the corrupt producer: How could this happen? I was so careful. I picked the wrong play, the wrong director, the wrong cast. Where did I go right? We forgot one important thing, Bloom. Adolf Hitler always drew a crowd.
Barbara Meany’s choreography with an agile chorus is packed with wit and high kicks. Tara Downes is utterly gorgeous as the sex siren Ulla/ Eva Braun; Barry Danaher is the robust mountainy kraut Franz Liebkind, author of the vile ‘Springtime’; James Malone is one sibilant hiss as Carmen Ghia, handmaid to director Roger de Bris/ Adolf Hitler – Brian Henry having the time of his bewigged life.
Sets are clever and many. It takes a discreet village to push them around, from Bavarian alps to Roger’s palatial commune of homosexuals.
Right to their well groped bottoms, Cecilian director Des Henn has worked outstanding performances from this cast; and from us, much guilty laughter. Be it jail house sex, to rich and randy grannies to #MeToo carry on, to firing irons at Jews, Micks, thicks, actors, blondes, white collar crime and facism, nothing is sacred to potty Liebkind’s pistol.
www.limetreetheatre.ie for proper good scandal.
By Rose Rushe
