“Because there’s another guy who’s perfect for it.”
Jerry goes over to the piano, sits down, and he plays “Springtime for Hitler.” He turns to me and says, “That’s a great song. That’s your centerpiece. That’s your second act’s climax!”
And then he played “Prisoners of Love.” He said, “You have two great songs already. Write half a dozen more and you’ve got a perfect Broadway show. You’re a natural-born songwriter. You should write the score. You write music, you write lyrics, and you know The Producers inside out.”
He then picked up the phone and called David Geffen.
“David, it’s Jerry. I’ve just sat at the piano. I’ve played Mel’s music. I’ve sung his lyrics. You’re crazy! You’ve got a diamond in the rough. Nobody knows that he’s a wonderful lyricist and composer, and you’ve got to use him for The Producers as a musical.”
So Jerry Herman got me the job.
I was going to create the score of a new Broadway show. Every note of every song was going to be written by me. I only had one small question: Could I do it? Once again, I confessed all my worries and doubts to Anne. And once again, she dispelled them immediately with, “Of course you can do it. You were meant to do it. So go write your score!”
Writing all the songs for The Producers musical would be a challenge, but I wanted to do it. What’s life without a challenge?
However, turning the screenplay of the movie into the libretto of a Broadway show, what we called “the book,” was a different thing altogether. I knew I needed help. So I called Tom Meehan, who in addition to working with me on To Be or Not to Be and Spaceballs also had written the book for Annie, one of the biggest hits ever on Broadway, for which he won the 1977 Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical. Tom loved the idea; he thought The Producers was a natural to become a big, bold, brassy Broadway musical. We started work right away.
“What we’ve got to do,” he said, “is to take the screenplay of The Producers entirely apart, as if we were dissecting the works of a finely crafted Swiss watch, and then put it back together again, adding new pieces called the songs where necessary, and hope that when we are finished it’s still ticking.”
My first vision of it before Tom got involved was basically what David Geffen had envisioned. That it was The Producers, the movie onstage as basically a play, where people sang once in a while. But if there were only one or two more songs besides “Springtime for Hitler” and “Prisoners of Love,” it wouldn’t have been a musical, but rather just a play with music.
Tom said, “No. A musical is a musical, not a play with music. A full-blown musical has many more songs covering many more emotions and plot twists. It’s a grand celebration.”
I realized I had my work cut out for me. I na?vely asked Tom, “How does one know where to stop the show and start a song?”
Tom said simply, “When you are so overcome with emotion that you can’t talk anymore…you start singing.”
I knew then that I had found a gem in Tom Meehan.
Tom suggested a British guy by the name of Mike Ockrent for our director. He was well known in the London theater scene and Tom had met him there and was really taken by him. Having seen his 1992 production on Broadway of Crazy for You, I thoroughly agreed. It was a wonderful conglomeration of George and Ira Gershwin’s standards with a bright, funny book by Ken Ludwig. Mike’s wife, Susan Stroman (who everyone calls Stro), won the Tony for Crazy for You’s fabulous choreography. They made a great team.
Tom had set a meeting with Mike and Stro for the afternoon after I was scheduled to arrive in New York. But I got to New York earlier than I expected, so I did something a little crazy. I went to Mike and Stro’s penthouse apartment, unannounced and unexpected. When they opened the door, I didn’t say hello, I burst into song! I started singing a song I had just written for the show, called “That Face.” A paean of praise to Bialystock and Bloom’s beautiful secretary, Ulla. I sang the song all the way down Mike and Stro’s long New York apartment hallway then jumped up on their sofa, finished the song like Al Jolson, and then said, “Hello. I’m Mel Brooks!”
They laughed their heads off and embraced me. They loved my crazy entrance, but more important—they liked the song. It was a match made in heaven. I knew Tom and I had found the right Broadway partners in crime.
The next day we met with Mike at a rehearsal hall where Stro and Mike were rehearsing for the musical version of A Christmas Carol, which they presented every Christmas at Madison Square Garden. Tom and I laid out our idea of how the book should go, and Mike stopped us and added wonderful thoughts along the way. Mike immediately saw ways to restructure the story of the film to turn it into a musical.
He said, “You’ve got to open with a curtain raiser.”
I said, “What’s that?”
“That’s a little number at the top of the show that says hello to the audience. And then you have to end the first act with a great big production number.”
I said, “Oh, I get it.”
Let me tell you, there’s a big difference between writing a screenplay and writing a musical. I learned that unlike any other form of entertainment a Broadway musical is a bunch of small fragments that come together. Book, music, staging, and so many other things have to be nurtured and developed over weeks and months by very talented people, otherwise it will never all gloriously work together onstage.
Tom and I decided that our opener would be an introduction of Max Bialystock, who used to be called “the King of Broadway” but has fallen on hard times and is now cursed with producing flop after flop. It would tell the audience right away that this is not going to be a simple re-creation of the movie, but its own unique entity.
MAX BIALYSTOCK:
I used to be the king, the king of old Broadway
The best of everything was mine to have each day
I always had the biggest hits
The biggest bathrooms at the Ritz
My showgirls had the biggest tits
I never was the pits in any way!
Max is a villain, but a lovable villain. When you write a song for a Broadway musical, the song not only has to work as a song but also has to move the story forward. We start with Max’s lament, and immediately enlist the audience’s sympathy.