The Biggest Flop About Broadway

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

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NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

The film version of “The Producers” opens today at midnight at the Ziegfeld Theater, just around the corner from the Great White Way. But don’t get excited just yet. “The Producers” is hardly the worst movie musical ever, Eric Grode writes in Friday’s New York Sun, but it might be the most unnecessary one. Just as the Tony-winning 2001 stage version took almost as many steps backward as forward from Mel Brooks’s 1968 film, this latest iteration botches as much as it gets right. When the new film works, it’s a moderately effective transfer of the stage show. When it doesn’t work – and it doesn’t, at many times, in many ways – it’s a mugging, mincing embarrassment, a textbook example of why some things make sense in one medium and not another.


Plus: How is the Broadway version holding up?

NY Sun
NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.


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