Things you thought you'd never see

The New York Times has an article by Michael Kimmelman about a production of The Producers in an unlikely place:

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. “Celebrated effusively by Berlin standards,” observed Stern magazine, the production nevertheless caused some theatergoers to wonder “whether it was really necessary to have so much Nazi paraphernalia onstage.” That’s not to mention the little Nazi flags, with pretzels in lieu of swastikas, that were handed out to everybody in the audience (including a troop of dirndled transvestites who waved them around like lost cheerleaders).
“Should one be allowed to laugh about Hitler?” The Berliner Morgenpost worried needlessly a few days earlier. “People in Tel Aviv laughed,” answered The Berliner Zeitung, as if the spectacle of knee-slapping Israelis might give Germans a little comedic wiggle room. German intellectuals naturally weighed in, too, about the healing effects of laughter.
Not that people here have been especially preoccupied with this deliriously crude borscht belt comedy about a theatrical depressive, Max Bialystock, and his mousy accountant, Leopold Bloom, two Jewish shysters scheming to cash in big by producing a flop celebrating the Nazis. The big question might really be: can Germans finally give themselves over to laughing at Jews, gay people, and just about everybody and anybody else whom Mr. Brooks skewers, turning the tables on Hitler’s own hate list? Yes, yes, yes, as that other fictional Bloom, married to a different Leopold, more or less once put it.
Ferdinand Delcker, a 30-year-old German novelist, was one of the many Berliners in the audience on Sunday who was too young to remember the Wall, never mind the war. I caught him on his way into the theater. “It’s great that people in the United States can laugh about everything, and we should be able to do the same,” he said, while a gay, glam-pop Berlin band, Cinema Bizarre, posed for photographers on a red carpet behind him. A reporter on his hands and knees mysteriously videotaped their shoes. “So much time has passed now,” Mr. Delcker added, paying no attention. “Most of my generation thinks laughing is possible.”
That said, when SS guards, arms raised in the Hitler salute, shouting Nazi slogans, marched onstage during the second act’s big Busby Berkeley-like Springtime for Hitler number, it seemed to me that the temperature in the theater did drop ever so slightly. A 26-year-old theatergoer, Diana Aurisch, said afterward, “I loved the show, but I wasn’t sure what to think of that segment, as if it wasn’t enough of a parody to laugh at or feel comfortable with.”
Then again, theatrical promotion is a ruthless business, whether the producer in question is Max Bialystock or the leather-suited Falk Walter, the real-life man who runs the Admiralspalast and on Sunday wore a pretzel-emblazoned Nazi armband when he came out to hand a prize to Mr. Brooks. (It was accepted in his absence by Thomas Meehan, who wrote the book with him and said, “I’m sorry I’m not Mel Brooks”, one of the night’s best lines.)
Tough times have hit theaters here. This German-language version of the show comes via Vienna, where the curtain fell on a planned yearlong run after only ten months. One estimate put losses there at $26,000 a week. About 71 percent of seats were sold. Ticket sales here picked up a bit after the opening on Sunday but have been equally slow. And Mr. Walter can’t count on a big, aging, suburban Jewish population to pad the parquet. So he has been pitching the show as a musical for people who don’t like musicals, hoping to drum up some controversy by selling a New York farce about Broadway con men as a litmus test for German tolerance of Hitler jokes. They’ve even hung what look like Nazi banners on the street outside the theater (again, with pretzels), making hay when a few people complained.
Sixty-four years have passed since the end of the war. This is now the European capital of cool. Germans have seen plenty of Hitler parodies, including the original Producers film from 1968. A translation of it played in West Germany nearly 35 years ago. The video version has been around for years. The film of the musical appeared here in 2006, and almost nobody made a peep. Classics like Chaplin’s Great Dictator and Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be have long given Germans an excuse to laugh. And German comedies like Mein Führer: The Truly Truest Truth About Adolf Hitler did well at the box office. A film by Dani Levy released here in 2007, it was so vulgar and bizarre that even the comedian who played Hitler, Helge Schneider, said, “I just don’t find it funny.”
Better, an animated cartoon, The Bonker, by Walter Moers, has been viewed by millions of people on YouTube, inspiring its own chin-scratching commentaries about changing German attitudes toward Hitler since it was released in 2006.
I found Oliver Polak at the premiere on Sunday. He is Germany’s only Jewish stand-up comic. In his act, this 33-year-old comedian said, he jokes about Germans and Jews. “The Holocaust is part of my life, so it’s part of my comedy,” he explained. “When I go into a restaurant and order water, and the waiter asks, ‘With or without gas?,’ obviously I order without.” He added: “If you make a joke about the Holocaust here, it has to be intelligent. It can’t be bad. I saw the Berlin mayor, who’s gay, drinking a Prosecco in the Führer box behind me during the premiere. He was laughing at the gay jokes. If the show played in other parts of the country, where you’d have a very different sort of audience, I can’t say what the reaction would be.” Maybe it would be different. “She shtupps to conquer” wasn’t the only joke that seemed likely to be lost in translation.
Even so, in a crucial respect the musical was right at home. The Admiralspalast opened in 1911 with a skating rink and some raunchy steam baths, and it became a popular music hall during the so-called Golden Twenties, when scantily dressed chorus girls and no doubt a slew of Jewish performers, Mr. Brooks’s comedic relatives and inspiration, did their shtick onstage.
The Producers is a love song to those bygone days of musical mayhem. It’s far more about those shows than it is about Hitler, whom this theater miraculously survived, as it did the bombardment and the Wall. Today it’s where a swishy Führer sings: Hitched up my pants. And conquered France! Now Deutschland’s smiling through! Amid the laughter of the German crowd, you can almost hear a page of history turn.