Read Online May the Farce Be With You by Roger Foss - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Roger Foss
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and ended up with âsomething peculiarâ â and thatâs despite having skilled British stage farceur Michael Pertwee in the writing team.
When it comes to musicalising low comedy, Mel Brooks (with co-author Tom Meehan) undoubtedly pulled a farce one by adapting his first film, The Producers ,for the stage and writing a brilliant new score to match his sleazy satire about a dubious Broadway producer deliberately staging the ultimate atrocious-taste musical disaster ( Springtime for Hitler ) that accidentally becomes box office gold.
Like âComedy Tonightâ in A Funny Thing⦠, the first two numbers of The Producers , âOpening Nightâ and âThe King of Broadwayâ, establish the comic atmospherics and give the audience a whiff of the brazen and bawdy burlesque business about to follow, when unscrupulous producer Max Bialystock and nervy accountant Leo Bloom scheme to defraud elderly backers to invest in a show that is a dead-cert flop, thereby enabling them to slip off with the loot. Springtime for Hitler becomes a surprise money-spinner but the two are sent to jail where they produce another show with the convicts, Prisoners of Love , which also becomes a hit and sets themon the road to slightly more honest fame and fortune on Broadway.
With its accelerating pace of action and an accumulation of near disasters that befall Max and Leo, The Producers is a prime example of farce and musicality meshed together. Thereâs a kind of seamless linkage between the comedy and the big brash Broadway-style numbers â a chorus girl dressed in giant pretzels; a line of old ladies doing a tap routine with Zimmer frames; a chorus of tap-dancing Nazis in Springtime for Hitler â so that the entire intricately constructed comedy edifice comes alive even better onstage than it did first time round on the big screen, partly because the theatre audience is complicit in Maxâs sleazy moral universe through communal laughter. As theatre critic Mark Shenton shrewdly observed in The Stage newspaper, Brooksâs stage version is âa valentine to the art of making theatre itselfâ.
Brooks himself clearly knew that creating farcical situations and big laughs on a theatrical scale involved more than just slotting in the gags and mad situations around the songs, but required numerous rewrites and revisions, as he revealed in an interview with Esquire magazine: âYou build a wall of comedy one brick at a time. If something doesnât work, youâve got to dismantle the wall and start all over again to make sure the bricksare interfacing and that they architecturally support the idea. The premise has to be solid or the comedy isnât going to work. When something isnât working in Act Two, sometimes you have to go back to a reference in Act One that wasnât developed clearly enough to get the explosion you want later on.â
Lend Me A Tenor, The Musical , Peter Sham and Brad Carrollâs musicalisation of Ken Ludwigâs 1986 madcap backstage farce Lend Me A Tenor , underwent numerous rewrites and workshops after premiering at the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 2007 and before its short West End run in 2011. Their musical adaptation sticks to the premise of Ludwigâs original cleverly constructed comedy about the zaniness that ensues when the worldâs greatest tenor comes to a small Midwestern cultural backwater to save its opera company by singing Verdiâs Otello .
The original playâs farce structure is as solid as Brooksâs wall of laughter â screwball situations involving multiple mistaken identities and an opera house full of mishaps are as furiously paced as anything by Feydeau or Ray Cooney.
But if the potentially explosive comedic value of the musical version loses its firepower in places itâs precisely because, unlike A Funny Thing⦠and The Producers , the songs and big production numbers throw a jarringbrake on the
When it comes to musicalising low comedy, Mel Brooks (with co-author Tom Meehan) undoubtedly pulled a farce one by adapting his first film, The Producers ,for the stage and writing a brilliant new score to match his sleazy satire about a dubious Broadway producer deliberately staging the ultimate atrocious-taste musical disaster ( Springtime for Hitler ) that accidentally becomes box office gold.
Like âComedy Tonightâ in A Funny Thing⦠, the first two numbers of The Producers , âOpening Nightâ and âThe King of Broadwayâ, establish the comic atmospherics and give the audience a whiff of the brazen and bawdy burlesque business about to follow, when unscrupulous producer Max Bialystock and nervy accountant Leo Bloom scheme to defraud elderly backers to invest in a show that is a dead-cert flop, thereby enabling them to slip off with the loot. Springtime for Hitler becomes a surprise money-spinner but the two are sent to jail where they produce another show with the convicts, Prisoners of Love , which also becomes a hit and sets themon the road to slightly more honest fame and fortune on Broadway.
With its accelerating pace of action and an accumulation of near disasters that befall Max and Leo, The Producers is a prime example of farce and musicality meshed together. Thereâs a kind of seamless linkage between the comedy and the big brash Broadway-style numbers â a chorus girl dressed in giant pretzels; a line of old ladies doing a tap routine with Zimmer frames; a chorus of tap-dancing Nazis in Springtime for Hitler â so that the entire intricately constructed comedy edifice comes alive even better onstage than it did first time round on the big screen, partly because the theatre audience is complicit in Maxâs sleazy moral universe through communal laughter. As theatre critic Mark Shenton shrewdly observed in The Stage newspaper, Brooksâs stage version is âa valentine to the art of making theatre itselfâ.
Brooks himself clearly knew that creating farcical situations and big laughs on a theatrical scale involved more than just slotting in the gags and mad situations around the songs, but required numerous rewrites and revisions, as he revealed in an interview with Esquire magazine: âYou build a wall of comedy one brick at a time. If something doesnât work, youâve got to dismantle the wall and start all over again to make sure the bricksare interfacing and that they architecturally support the idea. The premise has to be solid or the comedy isnât going to work. When something isnât working in Act Two, sometimes you have to go back to a reference in Act One that wasnât developed clearly enough to get the explosion you want later on.â
Lend Me A Tenor, The Musical , Peter Sham and Brad Carrollâs musicalisation of Ken Ludwigâs 1986 madcap backstage farce Lend Me A Tenor , underwent numerous rewrites and workshops after premiering at the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 2007 and before its short West End run in 2011. Their musical adaptation sticks to the premise of Ludwigâs original cleverly constructed comedy about the zaniness that ensues when the worldâs greatest tenor comes to a small Midwestern cultural backwater to save its opera company by singing Verdiâs Otello .
The original playâs farce structure is as solid as Brooksâs wall of laughter â screwball situations involving multiple mistaken identities and an opera house full of mishaps are as furiously paced as anything by Feydeau or Ray Cooney.
But if the potentially explosive comedic value of the musical version loses its firepower in places itâs precisely because, unlike A Funny Thing⦠and The Producers , the songs and big production numbers throw a jarringbrake on the
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