Mel Brooks, what were you thinking?

Ten years ago, Mel Brooks’ The Producers musical had just wrapped on Broadway. As it set off on its national tour, it seemed to one and all that Mel Brooks making a Broadway musical out of his zany 1960's romp The Producers was a good idea. If you judged by the sack full of Tony awards it won, that image would be reinforced. But try actually listening to the songs!  

Last year I tried listening to the tune “Where Did We Go Right?” and had to stop halfway through. Sure Matthew Broderick has a good set of pipes, but Nathan Lane does not. The song itself brought two words to mind: This sucks.  

The fact that The Producers musical simply rehashed the plot of the movie is another strike against it. Just add more swearing and explicit sexual references. It is a supreme irony that the musical version in turn became a movie all its own. The mostly lukewarm reviews it garnered were an inevitable fate.   And (spoiler alert!) changing the ending to having Max and Leo being released from jail and becoming and "kings of Broadway" was cheesy.   The cream of the joke when it came to the original movie was that Max and Leo did not learn their lesson and set up a new scam while in prison.

Mel Brooks, what were you thinking, making musicals out of your classic flicks? Were you that really out of ideas? Why couldn't you have left things alone? Or did doing musical numbers for the original Producers, Blazing Saddles, High Anxiety and The History of the World, Part I compel you to go all-out?

Sure, The Producers was a success on Broadway. Your adaptation of Young Frankenstein, however, fell short of it.  And please don't give us a singing Sheriff Bart and Waco Kid, my friend. It would spoil the soup of hilarity that is the first movie of yours I ever saw: Blazing Saddles.  It would spoil the fun of that wacky western.

Article image courtesy Wikimedia.