The hit that nearly didn't happen

It would be understatement to say that when Jaws star Richard Dreyfus withdrew - or fled - from the West End production of The Producers days before previews of the musical were to begin back in October, panic reigned at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. As the frenzy mounted it was the figure you might least expect to remain cool who kept almost eerily calm. It was Mel Brooks - Mel the temperamental, Mel the manic, Mel the man who can make the veins on his forehead stand out in a relief of rage when sufficiently roused --who got on the phone and sweet talked an exhausted Nathan Lane - Broadway's original Max Bialystock - into abandoning his first real holiday in three years and returning to a role he no longer particularly savoured.

It was Brooks who rubber stamped Lane's history-making deal of £38,000 a week and it was Brooks who rallied his cast with a quip and a shrug. As one insider remembers, 'People were angry and morale was low. But Mel was wonderful. Our nickname for him was the Storm Trouper. While we were acting theatrical, Mel's attitude was pragmatic: "Oh, please, this is nothing - if you only knew what I've already been through getting this baby on the road."'

Indeed. Now that The Producers boasts a record 12 Tonys, has grossed in excess of $200 million (another record) and become not just Broadway's most massive hit in 25 years, but a once-in-a-generation must-see cultural phenomenon, it seems that the show was always bound to be a sure-fire smash. But it would actually be truer to say that The Producers was the hit that was never supposed to happen.

For 15 years Broadway had been hostage to dark, bloated British imports such as Les Miserables and The Phantom Of The Opera, home-grown sourness (hello there, Stephen Sondheim) and pasteurised Disney family fare (The Lion King, Beauty And The Beast). Out and out fun was out of fashion.

Moreover, most successful musicals today are derived from pre-proven material. Lloyd Webber's The Woman In White is taken from an 1860 Gothic bestseller. Cameron Mackintosh's Mary Poppins comes from a children's classic and an Oscar-anointed film. But The Producers was based on a 1967 movie misfire. Brooks's directorial debut did earn him an Academy Award for Best Screenplay, but the finished product was an unmitigated disaster. Shot for a paltry $940,000, it didn't even earn back its costs. The forthcoming musical remake with Lane and Matthew Broderick should blow that on catering alone. Small wonder that even when the film gained cult status, Brooks still shuddered at the memory: 'The reviews were so scathing I nearly gave up show business and considered going back to college.'

Ironically, the greatest obstacle to The Producers ever making it to the stage was Mel Brooks himself. When Hollywood hotshot David Geffen rang him in 1998 to see if he'd be interested in turning The Producers into precisely the sort of musical The Producers once

parodied, Brooks's instant response was a polite 'No'. During more than 16 calls in eight days he told Geffen why The Producerswas beyond re-fashioning, especially in a newly PC era: it caricatured gays, transformed Adolf Hitler into a cartoon Reich Chancellor, portrayed old ladies as nymphomaniacs, treated blonde, big-breasted bimbos as... well, blonde, bigbreasted bimbos. Not to mention the humour itself. Heavy Jewish and hardcore Manhattan, such wild and vulgar wit hadn't travelled well outside New York, Chicago and LA the first time around. (It should be noted here that The Producers' Canadian company would later bomb, halfproving Brooks's point.)

Yet on the ninth day, Brooks relented: 'I suddenly said yes - I'll do it!' And why not? At 75 the one-time King Of Comedy had nothing to lose. The glory days of Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein were definitively over and he'd long ago been bested in bad taste by the little bastards he'd helped birth.

South Park and The Farrelly brothers had inherited the box office.

Disaster soon struck. Shortly after Brooks changed his mind, Geffen dropped out and, at first, investors were scarce. Brooks would have to break Max Bialystock's No.1 rule: 'Never put your own money into a show.' Then its first signed director, Mike Ockrent, died, leaving Ockrent's widow, the director and choreographer Susan Stroman, to pick up the pieces. When Broadway giant Jerry Herman bowed out from composing the score, Brooks was obliged to pen 17 peppy songs himself. The old dog taught himself some new tricks - fast, and found that his personal fusion of toughness, talent and ego was just what the producer of The Producers needed. The hippy, Hitler-playing junkie character was dumped (drug casualties weren't amusing anymore). Casting the openly gay Nathan Lane as Max was a neat way of defusing charges of homophobia, and making Max's relationship with Leo distinctly homoerotic was a masterstroke. Likewise, the evolution of the sex interest role of Swedish receptionist Ulla into romantic ingénue.

Soon The Producerswas conventional and unconventional - aesthetically right and commercially shrewd, and ready to pull in a whole new demographic. Which didn't stop nay-sayers from predicting calamity. For all his bluster, Brooks was tempted to believe the dour chorus. Writing in TheNew York Times before the show's opening in April 2001, he was uncharacteristically nervous: 'I hope for the best, expect the worst.' Not until the Chicago try-out 11 days before the official opening, did word-of-mouth turn and momentum build... and build... and build.