The Producers

Patrick Marber’s revival of Mel Brooks’ The Producers, transplanted from the Menier Chocolate Factory to the Garrick Theatre with Andy Nyman as Max Bialystock, arrives like a confetti cannon of theatrical mischief — loud, precise and intermittently wicked in its timing. It’s a show that knows exactly how to make an audience forgive its own ethical whiplash by delivering joke after impeccably shaped joke, and here the company — largely reassembled from the Menier run — works like a thoroughly lubricated vaudeville machine.

For those who need a nudge of provenance: Brooks’ savage little farce began life as a cult film in 1968 starring Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder before being reborn as a Tony-sweeping Broadway musical in 2001. That original run of a show whose history is part prank, part cultural lightning-rod and part theatrical triumph haunts and enriches Marber’s production; this revival honours Brooks’ gleeful nastiness while softening none of the show’s old, uncomfortable edges. It’s a reminder that satire with teeth needs a steady hand.

Andy Nyman’s Max is the production’s axis. He’s a slippery comic veteran, equal parts charmer and confidence trickster, and he plays Bialystock not as a moustache-twirling villain but as a desperately theatrical small man whose vanity makes him both ridiculous and oddly endearing. Across from him Marc Antolin’s Leo Bloom is a marvel of contained panic; Antolin turns Bloom’s neuroses into a physical language, and their chemistry fuels the show’s beating heart.

Australian drag star Trevor Ashley as Roger DeBris offers a deliciously baroque counterpoint, and Joanna Woodward’s Ulla provides the kind of bright, guileless sex appeal that the show needs to balance its cynicism. There’s rich support from the rest of the company from Harry Morrison’s comic absurdism as crazed pigeon-fancying Nazi Franz Liebkind to Raj Ghatak’s stylishly fevered Carmen Ghia.

Marber’s direction (and the production values that have been beefed up for the Garrick) lean into spectacle without losing the rhythm of pure farce. The set is a lovely, slightly louche pastiche of 1950s Broadway. Costume and lighting designers collude here to keep the stage perpetually on the right side of gaudy: showbiz bright but never sloppy. The musical’s central conceit of two showmen plotting to make a fortune from a deliberately offensive flop may sound reckless in 2025. That’s because it is.

But this production insists the joke isn’t a defence of ugliness; it’s an interrogation of taste and cowardice. Marber’s staging allows the satire to skewer both fascism’s absurdity and showbusiness’s moral compromises. There are moments where the laughter catches in the throat, and that is as it should be: a good farce makes you complicit before it pulls the rug away.

There are, inevitably, small damp patches. A gag occasionally overstays its welcome, and a tonal pivot can jolt the comic momentum. But these nitpicks are tributaries to the greater river: this is a revival that understands energy, precision and the arithmetic of a laugh. For anyone who loves musical comedy that still believes in taking risks, this Producers with its excellent cast, sure creative hand, and the weight of its curious, scandalous history is a riotous evening that knows how to make you laugh and then think about why you laughed. In modern West End terms, that’s as rare as it is necessary.

The Producers continues at Garrick Theatre until 21 February 2026.


Photo credit: Manuel Harlan