‘A Musical Romp With Mel Brooks’ On CPTV

Still ticketless for Broadway’s hottest must-see musical? The next best thing has arrived, courtesy of the CPTV series Great Performances. The series that gave reviewers “Guys and Dolls Off the Record” has returned to the audio suite, this time Sony Classical, for “Recording The Producers: A Musical Romp With Mel Brooks,” airing on CPTV on Saturday, August 11, at 9:30 pm.

The entire cast of The Producers, the new Mel Brooks Tony-winner is on hand, led by Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick, plus Tony-winning director Susan Stroman and master Mel Brooks himself. CPTV can be seen on Charter Communications channel 12.

In “A Musical Romp,” the camera captures the behind-the-scenes story of the full-day cast-album session as the company lays down the score Brooks expanded from his 1968 Oscar-winning movie classic. Nathan Lane plays desperate Broadway producer Max Bialystock, who joins forces with a mild-mannered accountant, Leo Bloom (Mathew Broderick), to make a fortune by producing a surefire bomb, Springtime for Hitler. Thus the stage is set for the kind of all-out comedy that no one does better than funnyman Brooks.

“Broadway is where it really belonged,” says Mr Brooks, who introduces each song in the telecast. The farce-meister not only wrote the music and lyrics – his first score at age 74! – but co-adapted the libretto with longtime friend and collaborator Thomas Meehan (Annie).

The Producers, which opened at Broadway’s St. James Theater on April 19, garnered a record 15 Tony nominations and rave reviews. The New York Times’ Brent Brantley led the parade. “It is, to put it simply, the real thing,” he wrote, “a big Broadway book musical that is so ecstatically drunk on its powers to entertain that it leaves you delirious, too.”

A baker’s dozen of songs manages to take center stage in “Recording The Producers.” From overture to final duet, the touching “Til Him,” the cameras capture the irrepressible comic performances, the recording-booth conferences, the pressure of fighting the clock and the grueling schedule to get the best takes possible. Interspersed throughout the recording scenes are interviews with Brooks, Stroman, Lane, Broderick and other key cast members.