The Producers - Palace Theatre - 22/02/07 by James Ellaby

There's posters up literally all over town, there were TV stars galore in the audience and paparazzi camera bulbs flashing outside on Oxford Road. Yes, The Producers is here. Mel Brooks' musical has been a smash hit wherever it has gone, and the actual producers of this new touring version have hit the jackpot by getting Britain's most popular comedian Peter Kay to take part.

However, while he's all over the promotional material for the show, he's not the star of it, with Cory English and John Gordon Sinclair reprising their roles as Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom from the West End production, and at the end of the night it is they who get the standing ovation. The story is probably familiar to most now, a failed Broadway producer joining up with a bored accountant to create the worst show ever in order to get rich through a complicated scene that is rather swiftly glossed over.

New Yorker English is Bialystock and he is excellent in the role, embodying the sleazy producer's character from the start to the finale, while Sinclair actually makes a better neurotic Bloom than the original Broadway actor Matthew Broderick. His high-pitched voice occasionally sounds like Kermit The Frog, but that's only a minor distraction from a fantastic performance. Also very impressive are Alex Giannini as deranged Neo-Nazi Franz Liebkind, Robin Sebastian as non-more-camp assistant to Kay's director, Carmen Ghia, as well as Emma-Jayne Appleyard as Swedish bombshell Ulla.

It's all derived of course from Brook's original 1968 film, but is now better known as the musical, and for good reason. The songs are uniformly catchy, funny and memorable, making it a musical for people who don't usually like musicals. It's not a satire, but it does poke fun at some of the conventions of these shows, while also coming up with some of the most inventive choreography around, using horny Little Old Ladies, Usherettes and Nazi Stormtroopers. The Springtime for Hitler scene is one of the funniest and most shocking things you'll see on stage, and Peter Kay's performance in it as Roger DeBris, playing Hitler, is a virtuoso display that brings the house down.

The humour of The Producers certainly isn't your usual family entertainment, with lots of crude references to sex, erections and more gays than you could wave an effeminite hand at. It still has Brooks written all over it, which means that it won't be to everyone's tastes, but even if you don't get all the jokes, there's still the songs, the choreography, and the awesome performances of all involved. The decision to cast Kay could have backfired, but he is really very good as the camp director DeBris and doesn't steal the show from the excellent leads, so it seems like the Palace Theatre really have got a smash-hit on their hands.