So is Mel Brooks's musical The Producers offensive? I only ask because this farcical love song to Broadway, which opens in London's West End on 9 November, has to be at least mildly shocking in order to work. If the audience doesn't understand that it is outrageous for two (Jewish) theatre producers to stage Springtime for Hitler as a Broadway musical, then its main axis is fundamentally cracked. It would be a bit like seeing Macbeth in a world where it had become uncontroversial to murder a mother and her infants, or Hamlet at a time when it was OK to pour poison into your brother's ear and shag his wife.
So does the show still work with Hitler as an out-and-out dancing queen, sporting a joke moustache and surrounded by skipping, gingham-clad Frauleins? Sixty years after his demise, the Fuhrer probably still carries enough menace to cause hysteria when he is thus caricatured and subverted. When I went to a preview, audience members were howling in the aisles with mirth. Yet I wondered how many of those weeping with laughter were Jewish. Obviously Brooks, the creator of the piece, is; and The Producers can be seen as part of a Broadway tradition of Jews mocking Jewish culture.
Still, how prevalent is this in Europe? David Baddiel, a prominent British comedy writer and performer, has never had cause to hide his Jewish lineage. But his stand-up style is not in the vein of, say, Jackie Mason. Indeed, he has publicly complained about anti-Semitism in the British media, and his latest novel, The Secret Purposes, pulls no punches on the subject of how his forebears suffered in the Second World War. Would he find a show that portrayed an all-singing, all-dancing Hitler hard to stomach? Probably not, because he is a youngish, sophisticated cultural consumer. But if they were alive, would he take his grandparents - German-Jewish refugees detained by the British on the Isle of Man during the war - to see The Producers?
Jews are by no means the only people caught in the searchlight of Brooks's slapstick. Gay men are stereotyped as John Inman-type prancers crossed with the Village People; lesbians are butch dykes; old ladies are revolting, sex-hungry crones in neck braces; nubile women are dumb blondes only vaguely brighter than Manhattan policemen. Indeed, only the Jewish producers come across as smart, loyal chaps. But in this, they are more like a pair of everymen than a Topol double act who go home for Mama's gefilte fish every Friday night. The Jewishness of Bialystock and Bloom has in effect been replaced with Yankee wisecracking.
Apart from their surnames and one Jewish gag, there is no upfront acknowledgement of their lineage.
So the producers are not all that Jewish. Hitler is portrayed as a nasty who wants to invade the world and squash the "Big Three". The squirming outrageousness of Springtime for Hitler must therefore reside largely in the minds of the audience, who are encouraged to laugh at the breathtaking audacity of two Jewish chaps laughing at the man who institutionalised the murder of their people. This is probably a very healthy state of affairs, and I'm sure it wasn't only Gentiles who were whooping it up at the preview performance. But would anyone who came to Britain, huddled and confused on the Kindertransport, select this show for a good night out?
