Theatre - Michael Coveney applauds Mel Brooks for turning tasteless farce into a peerless musical

When he received one of his dozen Tony awards for the musical reincarnation of The Producers in New York three years ago, Mel Brooks said that he wanted to thank his mother and his father. He wanted to, but he couldn't. They were dead. And if you don't find that funny, you are probably dead, too.

One way of checking your pulse is to go along to Drury Lane and see the funniest musical ever written since they invented the wheel and the bottom fell out of the market for sedan chairs.

New Yorkers started to get over the events of 9/11 by going back to the theatre. Within a few days of that catastrophe, the audience at The Producers, which had opened a few months before, was packed, and laughing fit to burst.

In times of trouble, nothing succeeds like excess, though one critic has greeted this hilarious efflorescence of bad taste and musical mayhem with the bizarrely prim caveat that a chorus line of goose-stepping Nazi storm troopers was hard to stomach so close to Remembrance Sunday.

By the same token, you should probably not treat your grandparents to a show that features a gang of little old ladies whizzing around on their walkers. The truth is that nothing is sacred. Why be a producer? For the benefit of mankind? To hell with it. As one of Brooks's imperishable lyrics nearly puts it, you do it because you dine with a duke and drink champagne till you puke: "Don't be stupid, be a smarty/Come and join the Nazi party!"

Mel Brooks has written all 17 new songs himself, making the search of the hapless wannabe impresario Max Bialystock and his hopeless sidekick, Leo Bloom, for the worst director in the world - to be unleashed on the worst show they can envisage - a gleeful, affectionate attack on the whole business of show. This is not move over Stephen Sondheim time. It's hello again to vaudeville, the American comedy of the 1950s and the rebarbative world of smart-alec Jewish payback.

When I saw this show in New York, I thought I'd died and gone to musical comedy heaven. Now I'm still pinching myself to know that I love it. It does not invalidate, as some sourpusses suppose, the ground-breaking operatic musicals of the past 20 years; it enhances them by being so different and reminding us why musical theatre is important in the first place.

Take Nathan Lane. This actor is unknown here. Yet he embodies completely the lost world of Zero Mostel, Phil Silvers, Jerry Lewis, the world of American comedy that no new worthwhile regime in Iraq can afford to be without.

Musical theatre is all about (or should be) delirium, the upper reaches of experience, the place where nuttiness takes over from normalcy. No society is worth living in without the unofficial madness represented by Lane. In Susan Stroman's amazing production, he dances on air, he sings with delight, he's a total schmuck.

One of Lane's films was Mouse Hunt, in which he starred with Lee Evans. When the original London casting of Richard Dreyfuss fell through (the biggest mystery of this production is how such a self-confessed musical theatre dumbo could have been cast in the first place), Lane rode into town to help out his old buddy and top up his pension fund.

The result is totally fantastic. Lane shares the gift of Laurence Olivier, Frank Sinatra and Danny Kaye in making each "repeat" great performance as urgently special and remarkable as the very first. And Evans supersedes even Matthew Broderick (who initiated the on-stage role of innocent, corruptible Leo and will repeat it with Lane in the upcoming movie remake) by investing the stooge with a heartbreaking, stage-invading physical grandeur. Having just played second string to Michael Gambon in Beckett's Endgame, Evans confirms his stand-up comedy credentials with another brilliant performance.

The duality of a true comedy partnership - Laurel and Hardy, Morecambe and Wise, Blair and Brown - lies at the root of the Lane and Evans encounter. They play off each other like veterans who know the score and each other's weaknesses.

Mel Brooks, with co-librettist Thomas Meehan (who wrote Annie and Hairspray, huge Broadway favourites), restores an adult delight in physical, smart-arse tap-and-toe musical theatre that has been under threat and only started a comeback with the revival of Chicago.

You can savour not only Lane and Evans, but also the physically astonishing Leigh Zimmerman as Ulla and Conleth Hill and James Dreyfus as a pair of hissy showbiz queens who bypassed purga-tory and made straight (in a manner of politically incorrect speaking) for heaven. See you there. Or in Drury Lane, whichever's nearest.

Booking at the Theatre Royal, London WC2 (0870 145 1163) until 23 April

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