The Producers

The boyfriend and I took our respective mothers to see "The Producers" at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, on Saturday. It was worth the associated stress of meeting our parents to see the show, which turned out to be really funny. It's based on the Mel Brooks film, with the central premise being that two Jewish theatre impressarios put on a spectacularly bad, tasteless musical entitled "Springtime for Hitler", intending to make money from it being a flop via some form of tax scam. Now, I have immense respect for the brain of anyone who can come up with that kind of idea for a plot!

I had a housemate at university who loved Mel Brooks and suddenly all of his comedic points of reference now make hilarious sense. I had not laughed so much in a long time - the show closes for good in January so I really wanted to see it before then, and I wasn't dissappointed. Reece Shearsmith (one of the "League of Gentlemen") turned in a great performance as accountant-turned-producer Leo Bloom. There's always a kind of surprising satisfaction whan you find out that someone who isn't known as a singer can actually sing, isn't there? And not just sing - engage in the full onslaught of musical theatre, with all of the physicality that it necessitates. We went to the afternoon performance, and thus we watched an understudy play the central role of Max Bialystock (Kit Newman instead of Cory English), but he was fantastic too. It seemed like a really demanding part to play. He was in pretty much all of the big numbers and he had a real belting energy in his voice. His characterisation was superb and you'd never have guessed that he wasn't the big-name, first-choice for the part. As if that wasn't enough, the show also had tapdancing grannies with zimmer frames, animatronic pigeons and, of course, the showstopping number "Springtime for Hitler", with the Third Reich realised in true Busby Berkeley style. Who could ask for anything more?

The only problem now is that I can't stop singing "Springtime for Hitler and Germany, winter for Poland and France...". As this floats through the criminally thin walls of our cottage, devoid of context, I fear that it is giving our neighbours the impression that we have become neo-nazis. Perhaps I should try and persuade them to go and see the show.

The Internet is the Answer

I came across an interesting message when trawling through the excessive quantities of spam in my inbox this morning. I'm guessing that the subject line was supposed to say enticingly: "melt away fat instantly". What it actually said was "melt away fate instantly".

And suddenly millions of us could start to finally take control of our destiny, with the help of a dodgy online pharmacy :-)