Stro vehemently added, “Out of town is critical—it will tell us what we have and what we don’t have.”
Stro wasn’t wrong. Out-of-town audiences are usually kinder to a new show than the tough, show-me Broadway audiences. When a show goes out of town it gives the actors a chance to play for a crowd of non–New Yorkers who will not boo or walk out while a show is breaking in. Giving the cast, especially a comedy, a chance to fine-tune their performances in front of sympathetic audiences. Playing first to out-of-town audiences is critical to the success of a Broadway show, but it can also be a difficult, heartbreaking experience. Sometimes things you wrote that were wonderful in rehearsal just don’t land out of town and you start to wonder, Could your big hit possibly be a big flop?
My old friend Larry Gelbart from Caesar’s Hour once said, “If Hitler was still alive, the worst thing I could wish him was to be out of town with a musical.”
So we went out of town and we took Hitler with us!
The Producers made its out-of-town debut at Chicago’s big, beautiful Cadillac Palace Theatre on February 1, 2001. Inside the theater, life was good but let me tell you something about Chicago in February. Calling it the Windy City was not a mistake. It lived up to “windy” in spades. It would have been cold enough without the wind, but with the cold blasts of wind at freezing temperatures I was the coldest I’ve ever been in my life. Yes, even colder than being a soldier in Germany during World War II in the late winter of 1945. It was just freezing! Absolutely freezing, I had to wrap a scarf around my face and pull my woolen hat down so that I could just about peer through the tiny space between my hat and my scarf to see where I was going. I was so happy to get to the Cadillac Palace Theatre, which was always warm and filled with music, laughter, and, not to mention, beautiful showgirls.
The entire run was almost completely sold out. We had our ups and downs, but generally the Chicago audiences were generous with their laughter and their applause. But Tom kept reminding me: “Out of town is out of town. It is not Broadway.”
And to be truthful, we felt the show was running a little too long. Instead of watching what was happening onstage all the time, sometimes Tom and I would watch the audience. We were afraid of what’s called “audience fatigue.” No matter how good the show is, after about two and a half hours the audience simply gets too tired of sitting in a theater to enjoy it anymore. So we trimmed jokes that got some laughs but the laughs weren’t surefire. We cut things that could have worked but weren’t worth the time when we knew we needed to make the show shorter.
When I was asked by a cast member who got a laugh on reading his line, “How could you cut my line? I got a laugh!”
I said, “Yeah…but the laugh wasn’t big enough.” So as far as jokes were concerned, it was survival of the funniest.
But you learn a lot out of town; sometimes instead of cutting you need to add a bit. It can be as small as needing an extra minute for a scene change. I remember one instance where Stro asked me to extend Matthew’s exit from the accounting office to cover the time necessary to make a smooth scene change. I went upstairs to my hotel room and came back down with this exchange between Leo Bloom and his boss, Mr. Marks:
Mr. Marks: Bloom, where do you think you’re going? You already had your toilet break!
Leo Bloom: I’m not going into the toilet! I’m going into show business! Mr. Marks, I got news for you: I quit! And you’re right about one thing: You are a C.P.A.—a Certified Public ASSHOLE!
So not only did we adequately cover our scene change, but we got a big laugh. That joke survived all the way to New York, but many fell along the way.
Our producers’ worries about the cost of going out of town were happily unfounded. We didn’t lose a penny by going to Chicago, but we gained something more valuable. When you go out of town, not only do you work out the kinks, but the actors get to bond with one another. Going out of town gives everybody working on a show away from their home an opportunity to become a happy family all pulling together for the same goal: a big fat smash hit. They even kind of grow to love one another, and by the time they get to New York they come in as a unit, as opposed to a disparate bunch of actors with egos who might fight with one another. And somehow, I think that love makes its way across the footlights to the audience.
We left Chicago with a show that we felt had a good chance to make it on Broadway. We made a lot of little changes, but the most important addition was a “goodbye song.” You remember I told you that in the Borscht Belt we all had “hello songs” to greet the audience? Hence my crazy “Here I am, I’m Melvin Brooks. I’ve come to stop the show.”
A “goodbye song” would be the other side of that coin. I said to Stro, “I feel that we should somehow blow a kiss goodbye to the audience to thank them for laughing and applauding all night.”
She agreed a hundred percent. The idea really excited her. As a matter of fact, she said, “I’m going to stage it right at the end of the curtain calls!”
And here’s the “Goodbye Song” that I wrote; I tried to make it touching but still funny:
Thanks for coming to see our show
Sad to tell you we got to go
Grab your hat and head for the door
In case you didn’t notice, there ain’t any more!
If you like our show tell ev’ryone but…
If you think it stinks, keep your big mouth shut!
We’re glad you came but we have to shout
Adios, au revoir, wiedersehen, ta-ta-ta
Goodbye…get lost…get out!
It was a huge success, the cherry on top of the cake.
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The Producers began previews on Wednesday, March 21, 2001, at the St. James Theatre. Before you open on Broadway you have a thing called previews. It’s a week or two of performances in front of audiences without critics to trim the fat off the show, hoping to get a lean, mean successful machine. The whole team was there every night, and after the show we’d have a note session for trimming, tweaking, polishing, and, last but not least, praying.
Things didn’t always go swimmingly with the audience during our previews. At one of them, during “Springtime for Hitler” an irate member of the audience came storming up the aisle yelling, “Where is Mel Brooks? This is an outrage! You’re celebrating Adolf Hitler?”
I said, “Let me handle this.” I ran and met him at the top of the aisle. I said, “I’m Mel Brooks. What’s your problem?”
He said, “This show is a disgrace. How could you sing about Hitler! I was a soldier. I fought in World War II!”
I said, “I also fought in World War II. I don’t remember seeing you there.” That kind of took the wind out of his sails. I said, “It’s all in fun, please take it that way.” Believe it or not, he actually calmed down and went back to his seat.
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