For seven weeks the funniest show in the West End, which was created by one of the funniest men who ever existed, will star Richard Kind, one of the funniest performers on screen and stage.
Whether as Larry David’s cousin in Curb Your Enthusiasm or the mysteriously eye-patched tenant in Only Murders in the Building, Kind steals scenes with the ease with which a kleptomaniac plunders an honesty box.
From brow to mouth the American actor has a face that was made for the stage. It has big features which project expression across an auditorium as clearly as his booming (yet cultured) voice delivers songs. Which is all to say that Patrick Marber’s revival of Mel Brooks’s smash hit musical is in safe hands with Kind in the role of Max Bialystock.
While he dons the down-at-heel producer’s dusty fedora and cardboard belt, the production’s original star Nyman is off to stage The Psychic, the multi-hyphenate’s latest project to be co-created with Jeremy Dyson which receives its world premiere in Yorkshire next month.
This then is a case of one quintessentially Jewish performance, which feels rooted in the genius of Zero Mostel, being replaced by another which is rooted in, well, being Richard Kind.
It is immediately clear he has the right stuff to play Bialystock. In Susan Stroman’s original Broadway production he followed Nathan Lane in the role in 2004, and then he did it again at the Hollywood Bowl in 2012. For this third time round the muscle memory serves him well, even if it is visible that at 69 years old the muscles don’t propel his sizeable frame around the stage with the speed they once did.
Kind has had to get used to a production that is smaller than the Broadway behemoth he knew in New York, but one that feels more raw and dangerous. Marber’s production has given Brooks’s glorious bad taste freer reign. In the HQ of the flamboyantly gay director Roger De Bris (an excellent Trevor Ashley), the director’s staff includes a gimp in bondage gear and a living statue that is better hung than Tate’s Turner and Constable exhibition.
Yet, as always, it is the swastikas that feel really dangerous. In the gob-smacking second act they’re everywhere. They are on the wings of pigeons, they are on the arms of a Nazi chorus line whose tap dancing shoots at a passing Chasid, and briefly they are on the arms of of the show’s two Jewish heroes, Max and his meek accountant Leo (Marc Antolin). “Such nice colours,’ says Max as he dons the armband given to him by the Nazi author of his latest show, Franz Liebkind (a deliciously funny, lederhosen-clad Harry Morrison).
This is not the first time a London theatre has been bedecked with the flag, of course. Stroman’s production had them and so did the Regents Park Open Air 2013 revival of The Sound of Music. But here it feels like two fingers to today’s gathering far right, especially when De Bris’s Nazi salute folds down from the wrist and becomes a hello ducky wave.
As Max says, Springtime For Hitler - a show that will make him rich but only if it’s a flop - is guaranteed to offend all religions, races and creeds. But that it will especially offend today’s Nazis makes this show feel a little more urgent and a little less indulgent.
The Producers
The Garrick
To get more from Life, click here to sign up for our free Life newsletter.