Hit(ler) of the year!

FOR spoofing, spiffing knockabout musical comedy, there has never been anything quite like The Producers.

This Mel Brooks show, that makes a mockery of a singing, dancing Hitler and his love of kitsch in the shape of Busby Berkeley chorus girls and goose-stepping soldiers, has driven Broadway audiences wild with pleasure.

It now hits the West End with the force of a revelation, not to mention Nathan Lane and Lee Evans, who strike up a razzle-dazzle comic partnership as play producers Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom, in pursuit of a dishonest million.

Now that Jerry Springer - The Opera, which elevates the musical to fresh heights of low humour, is joined in London by The Producers, the traditional romantic musical looks even more old hat.

Yet The Producers is no monument to bad taste, unless you take exception to Hitler being treated as a comic turn or to a chorus of old ladies, in need of zimmer frames, confessing they are wild for sex. The twists and turns of the fantastic, surrealistically-tilted narrative generate rare amusement. Otherwise Brooks's lyrics boast hardly a single rude word. Stylistically the music harks back to the age of Oklahoma.

The songs, aside from the chauvinistic strutting of Springtime For Hitler, are notable for humour and Susan Stroman's dynamic choreography, not their tunes.

The novelty of the show, mainly based on Brooks's cult film of the same name, springs from the ingenuity of its plot and plotting. Brooks has written comic sketches and songs for 50 years. Here he concocts a vintage fairytale of New York narrative, heady with Broadway's dangerous romance, but satirically tuned to its campness and absurdities.

Lane's Bialystock, whose latest fiasco Funny Boy, the musical version of Hamlet, is financed by old women in return for his sexual favours, heads for oblivion. Lane, all pulsating with aggression and sexual opportunism, looks for a way out.

Then the wonderful Lee Evans, with that stiff, jerky walk of his, head tilting forward, limbs and spirit quavering with anxiety, comes calling as nerdy accountant Bloom.

Leo's suggestion that Max should raise a million dollars, produce a sure-fire disaster for a mere $100,000, and pocket the leftover money, offers an illegal way out for Bialystock.