The Führer Returns to Berlin, This Time Saluted Only by Laughs
BERLIN — Can Germans laugh at Hitler?
This country is so earnest sometimes that even the arrival, finally, of Mel Brooks’s slapstick musical adaptation of his cult classic film “The Producers” has provoked newspapers here to rehash the eternal question.
Eight years after conquering Broadway and then much of the rest of the world (it just invaded Moscow), the show rolled into town on Sunday night. It’s booked for a two-month run at the Admiralspalast, where Adolf himself liked to take an occasional break from invading Poland and France to enjoy light operettas from the Führer’s box.
The crowd for the premiere seemed pleased. It wasn’t your typical Broadway musical audience, to judge from the number of smart-looking young people with interesting haircuts. A “lively counterpoint to Hollywood productions like ‘Valkyrie’ and ‘Defiance,’ with their impeccable Resistance heroes and clichés,” decided the reviewer for Spiegel Online.
“The New York triumph was repeated in Berlin,” concluded the newspaper Tagesspiegel....
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This country is so earnest sometimes that even the arrival, finally, of Mel Brooks’s slapstick musical adaptation of his cult classic film “The Producers” has provoked newspapers here to rehash the eternal question.
Eight years after conquering Broadway and then much of the rest of the world (it just invaded Moscow), the show rolled into town on Sunday night. It’s booked for a two-month run at the Admiralspalast, where Adolf himself liked to take an occasional break from invading Poland and France to enjoy light operettas from the Führer’s box.
The crowd for the premiere seemed pleased. It wasn’t your typical Broadway musical audience, to judge from the number of smart-looking young people with interesting haircuts. A “lively counterpoint to Hollywood productions like ‘Valkyrie’ and ‘Defiance,’ with their impeccable Resistance heroes and clichés,” decided the reviewer for Spiegel Online.
“The New York triumph was repeated in Berlin,” concluded the newspaper Tagesspiegel....