In addition to its massive success on Broadway and beyond, Mel Brooks’ screwball musical The Producers has had a particularly remarkable amount of local popularity in the past couple of years, having had something like three different productions staged in and around Milwaukee in the past year or so, including impressive stagings by both The Skylight Opera and Carte Blanche Studios. This May T...

A four-piece band joins some 30 people and half a dozen pigeon puppets for an enjoyable evening of musical comedy as Carte Blanche Studios presents Mel Brooks and Thomas Meehan’s The Producers. Carte Blanche’s Jimmy Dragolovich packs the tiny studio theatre with a parade of elaborate sets and costumes for a very, very ambitious production. The costumes, designed by the team of Kate Vannoy, ...

As mentioned before, there are a lot of shows opening this weekend. Trying to figure out a pattern to openings in the Milwaukee theatre season can be a strange kind of Rorschach test. I’m not quite sure of what it says about the local theatre community that two of the shows opening in Milwaukee this weekend happen to be two entirely different productions of Mel Brooks' The Producers, so I think...

The people who only flock to big-budget touring Broadway shows miss out on some really beautiful musical theater performed on the smaller stages of local companies. Off the Wall Theatre has been packing rather large, sometimes impressive musicals into its small studio space for years. And Carte Blanche Studios recently staged...

Skylight Theatre’s Artistic Director Bill Theisen and comic talent Brian Vaughn star in the title roles of the Mel Brooks/Thomas Meehan hit musical The Producers, which concludes its run this afternoon with a 2 p.m. performance at the Broadway Theatre Center. Theisen plays the reprehensible yet lovable, down-on-his-luck theater producer Max Bialystock. During a conversation with his accountant, Leo Bloom (Vaughn), Bialystock realizes that one of his shows closed so quickly that he actually received more funding than he spent on it. With that in mind...

Skylight Theatre’s Artistic Director Bill Theisen and comic talent Brian Vaughn star in the title roles of the Mel Brooks/Thomas Meehan hit musical The Producers, which continues its run tonight with a 7:30 p.m. performance at the Broadway Theatre Center. Theisen plays the reprehensible yet lovable, down-on-his-luck theater producer Max Bialystock. During a conversation with his accountant, Leo Bloom (Vaughn), Bialystock realizes that one of his shows closed so quickly that he actually received more funding than he spent on it. With that in mind, the two...

Skylight Theatre’s Artistic Director Bill Theisen and comic talent Brian Vaughn star in the title roles of the Mel Brooks/Thomas Meehanhit musical The Producers, which continues its run tonight with a 7:30 p.m. performance at the Broadway Theatre Center. Theisen plays the reprehensible yet lovable, down-on-his-luck theater producer Max Bialystock. During a conversation with his accountant, Leo Bloom (Vaughn), Bialystock realizes that one...

The core appeal of the now-classic show The Producers is the perennial fascination with its signature showpiece, the outrageous, improbable, addictively appealing key number "Springtime for Hitler"-outrageous because Mel Brooks has so slyly transformed a historic nightmare into a classic guilty pleasure, improbable in that this paean to alleged bad taste is so "tastefully" worked into a sure-fire fun-filled book that audiences eat it up with uncritical delight. The outstanding 1967 movie has never been so well served: Skylight's unyieldingly exuberant musical production, letter perfect to a fault, containing dance numbers executed with a precision to honor any Broadway musical, rivals the highly touted...

The Producers has a strange history in my memory. I vaguely seem to remember being in second or third grade when I first saw Mel Brooks’ original 1968 film on television. It was an independant station that played it quite often, so I saw a number of times. The concept of success through failure seemed remarkably witty to a kid who had spent so much of his spare time watching some particularly b...