By The Standard

Copyright standard

At 99 years old, and amid countless other achievements, Mel Brooks can congratulate himself on having the funniest show in London. The Producers also feels like it’s meeting a moment. A tale of two Jewish chancers aiming to fleece sex-starved elderly female investors by staging a surefire Broadway flop – a gayed-up Third Reich musical called Springtime For Hitler – it’s willfully, joyfully offensive to just about everyone.

I watched an audience belly-laugh at its swastika-strewn antics on Saturday, while far-right flag-shaggers milled around the West End outside. In a time of polarisation and performative outrage, this show is a hymn to tolerance and the ability to laugh with others and at oneself.

Patrick Marber’s revival (the first since the original Broadway production, based on Brooks’s 1967 film, came to London in 2004) has grown in swagger and finesse since it premiered at the Menier last December. Now, I honestly can’t find fault with it. Its linchpin is Andy Nyman’s Max Bialystok, a once-great producer whose latest opus – Funny Boy, a musical based on Hamlet – bombs during the opening number.

Nimble and snappish, Nyman beautifully underplays a part that’s an invitation to hysteria. He too can congratulate himself: he’s starring in this hilarious hit while the super-spooky Ghost Stories, which he co-wrote, is coming to the Peacock Theatre later this month.

Bialystok is a magnificently shabby creation, his stained suit held up by a cardboard belt, strands of hair apparently plastered to his scalp with saliva. When anxious accountant Leo Bloom (Marc Antolin, physically fluent and sweet-voiced in the trickier role) realises a disaster could be more remunerative than a hit, an unlikely partnership is formed.

Indeed, Bloom’s eventual seduction by the pneumatic Swedish wannabe actress Ulla (Joanna Woodward) is secondary to their bromance. The Producers is also in love with the showbiz conventions it spoofs, from high-kicking chorus lines to vaudevillian patter. Marber turns the second number The King of Broadway into a pastiche of Fiddler on the Roof, complete with capering Hassidim, and there are nods to the King and I and Singin’ in the Rain in later routines.

Pocket rocket Woodward is very funny in a role that’s pure, heavily-accented, cartoonish sexuality, and she’s matched by a sprawlingly comic Harry Morrison as the lederhosen-clad, pigeon-fancying Franz Liebkind, who’s written about the Adolf Elizabeth Hitler (“Ja, zat voss his middle name”) he knew. As the flappy gay director Roger DeBris, presiding over a retinue of queer archetypes, Trevor Ashley is also sublime, a camp galleon under full sale when in drag.

Lorin Latarro’s choreography has more room to breathe at the Garrick, and it’s a riot of goose-stepping chorus girls and boys in sequined hot pants, jackboots and helmets. Costume designer Paul Farnsworth lets rip with Follies-style extravagances referencing U-Boats, Bier steins and Bratwursts.

Once again, I was hugely entertained by the well-endowed living statue, the latex-masked gimp and the sexy Jesus in De Bris’s apartment. There are brilliant touches I don’t remember from the Menier: the close relationship between Franz and one of his antisemitic pigeons, dancers emulating the Reichstag fire, a backdrop of swastikas picked out in pastel roses for the show-within-a-show’s titular anthem. In that number, as has become traditional, Mel Brooks’s recorded voice delivers the line: “Don’t be stoopid, be a smarty/Come and join the Nazi Party!”

Brooks shares the writing credit for the book of The Producers with Thomas Meehan but the music, the savagely comic lyrics and the profane comic zest are all his. And the man who also gave us Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, who produced The Elephant Man and The Fly, is still working, planning a sequel to his sci-fi spoof Spaceballs.

Truly we are not worthy. The line Bialystok quotes from a review of Springtime for Hitler also sums up The Producers: “It was shocking, outrageous and insulting – and I loved every minute of it.”

To 21 Feb, nimaxtheatres.com.