Producers Soundtrack CD

Lyricist: Mel Brooks.
Personnel: Bryn Dowlins, Meg Gillentine, Gary Beach, Matthew Broderick, Nathan Lane, Roger Bart, Uma Thurman, Will Ferrell (vocals); John Barrowman (tenor).
Audio Mixer: Frank Wolf.
Liner Note Author: Jonathan Schwartz.
Recording information: Right Track Recording.
Mel Brook's THE PRODUCERS, which was first released as a film in 1968, became a hit Broadway play in the early 2000s before moving back to the screen (as a film adaptation of the stage production) in 2005. Many of the key players from the stage production are on hand for the film, including lead actors Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick, and director Susan Stroman.
A satire of show business, musicals, and Nazism (who can forget "Springtime for Hitler"?), THE PRODUCERS relies heavily on its music, and the screen version is no exception. Broderick and Lane are in fine form throughout the recording, and Uma Thurman (as Ulla) and Will Ferrell (as Franz Liebkind), both of whom were cast specifically for the film, bring plenty of comic pizzazz to their performances. This comes recommended to fans of THE PRODUCERS in any of its incarnations.
The Producers began as a 1968 film comedy starring Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder about a Broadway producer and an accountant who deliberately create a flop musical in order to pocket their investors' money, only to be foiled when the show turns into a success. Writer/director Mel Brooks turned the story into an actual Broadway musical in 2001, even writing his own score (which satirized show music of the '40s and '50s), and it became a long-running hit. So, inevitably, a film based on the musical (based on the film about a musical) followed in 2005, and just as inevitably, there was a soundtrack album. The stage musical, of course, had generated a perfectly adequate cast album, making the soundtrack album a disposable redundancy, but never mind. The film features many of the same performers from Broadway, notably stars Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick, along with Gary Beach and Roger Bart, although box-office names Uma Thurman and Will Ferrell have replaced others; both are unobjectionable. The orchestrations provide for a bigger orchestra, naturally. The album adds a good, if unnecessary new song, "There's Nothing Like a Show on Broadway," as well as a strange version of "Der Guten Tag Hop-Clop," re-titled "The Hop-Clop Goes On" and given an Adult Contemporary ballad arrangement. "The King of Broadway," one of the show's better songs, was cut from the film version, but a recording of it has been stuck on the end of the soundtrack album, anyway. The original Broadway cast album is still the recording of this music to buy. (A version of the soundtrack album sold only at Borders stores added another track, "In Old Bavaria.") ~ William Ruhlmann
Unlike most soundtrack albums, the one for The Producers does not restrict itself to containing just the score of the film; in fact, it is dominated by dialogue excerpts that add up to an audio version of the movie in miniature. Writer/director Mel Brooks' comedy about two producers who scheme to make a bundle by over-capitalizing a flop Broadway show stars Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder, who also turn up on most of the tracks here, conceiving the idea; executing it by finding a terrible script, a terrible director, and a terrible cast; and suffering the consequences of its surprise success. The film itself is a semi-musical, with Dick Shawn swanning through a folk-rock protest song parody, "Love Power" (written by Norman Blagman and Herb Hartig), and two purported show excerpts, "Springtime for Hitler" and "Prisoners of Love" (both composed by Brooks). And there is a score, composed by John Morris, which peeks in here and there, displaying a '60s pop sensibility. But this soundtrack is mostly about the comic interaction between Mostel and Wilder, much of which is hilarious. Initially released on LP by RCA Victor Records in 1968, The Producers was reissued o