‘54 Below Sings Mel Brooks’

The way Mel Brooks tells it, when producer David Geffen approached him with the idea to transform his classic 1967 comedy “The Producers” into a musical, his first idea was to recruit Jerry Herman to write the songs. The veteran Broadway composer took the meeting, where he said, “It’s a great idea for a show, but I’m not the guy to write it. The composer you want is the man who wrote this,” and he then proceeded to sit down at the piano and play “Springtime for Hitler.” Mr. Brooks got the message, and gave himself the job.

Even before “The Producers,” opened on Broadway — and gathered more Tony awards than any other show before or since — there was a “Mel Brooks Songbook,” mostly numbers he had written for other films, notably “Blazing Saddles” and “Young Frankenstein” (both 1974). Between the songs in his films and those in his two stage musical comedies, the megahit “Producers” (2001) and the under-appreciated stage version of “Young Frankenstein” (2007), Mr. Brooks has given us a vibrant catalog of songs that is ripe for an anthology presentation such as the one staged at 54 Below on Monday evening.

Michael Kostroff made his entrance as host by telling us: “Mel Brooks taught me everything I know about what’s funny.” He demonstrated that he learned his lesson well with a classic Brooksian shtick that goes back to Jack Benny and Bob Hope: the art of putting yourself down by pretending to build yourself up. He repeatedly boasted that he played Max Bialystock in “The Producers,” but then under his breath murmured that it was during the national tour, not Broadway, and that even then he was primarily an understudy.

The Brooks musical canon is divided between songs that are relatively sincere and those that are overt parodies — much as you can’t really appreciate “Young Frankenstein” unless you’ve seen “Son of Frankenstein” or any of the other classic 1930s Universal horror films, the more Broadway musicals you’ve seen the harder you will laugh at the songs in “The Producers.” Even though it’s a straightforward, mostly original story, it satirizes nearly every trope of classic Broadway. 

Sometimes Mr. Brooks writes a song that is completely “straight,” like the opening theme to “Blazing Saddles”; it’s a familiar anecdote that he made a point not to tell Frankie Laine (who had famously sung such iconic Western themes as “High Noon” and “Rawhide”) he was singing the theme from a spoof movie — it was actually funnier that he didn’t know. At 54 Below, it was sung by Kyle Scatliffe, a tall, strapping baritone who would be a perfect “Sheriff Bart” if the property ever comes to Broadway.  

Contrastingly, the title song from “High Anxiety” was originally a parody of movie themes like the many written for Sinatra by Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen; Jill Abramowitz, in high heels and short shorts, delineated it in an entirely new way than was less Frank and more highly anxious and neurotic.

The other big song from “Blazing Saddles” is “I’m Tired,” rendered mock-seductively by Lindsay Nicole Chambers in slinky sleepwear.  Unlike the film’s title tune, this is an overt parody, a take-down of Marlene Dietrich in “Destry Rides Again,” with Ms. Chambers elaborating on Madeline Kahn’s savaging of Dietrich’s underpitch warbling.

Mr. Brooks’s family is of German descent, on his father’s side, and I never previously noticed how much his song-and-dance projects pivot around German music and culture. There’s all manner of Teutonic tunes in “The Producers,” in which, after all, the centerpiece is a show-within-a-show that’s a musical love letter to Adolph Hitler and the Nazi Party. Although “Springtime for Hitler” is more Jerry Herman (an over-the-top title tune to compete with “Hello, Dolly”), “Haben Sie Gehört Das Deutsche Band?” directly references a whole subgenre of ersatz beer garden polkas, like “Listen to The German Band” and “Moonlight and Pretzels.”  

There’s also the Dietrich spoof in “Blazing Saddles,” and one of the high points of “Young Frankenstein” — which actually takes place in Germany — is “He Vas My Boyfriend.” The latter, performed by Tony winner Karen Ziemba at 54B à la Lotte Lenya, takes aim at Kurt Weill’s more brutal torch songs like “Surbaya Johnny” and “Pirate Jenny,” complete with Weillish vamp.

One aspect of the Brooks canon that the 54B presentation clarified — that you don’t fully realize until you hear these songs out of their original contexts — is that he can write more than spoof numbers. “The Producers” boasts many first-rate show tunes that stand on their own, like Leo Bloom’s love song to Ulla, “That Face,” and his even-more-moving love song to Max, “Till Him,” which Mr. Kostroff and company used for part of the closing number at 54B.

The main closer on Monday was “Hope For the Best (Expect The Worst)” (from “The Twelve Chairs”), which draws on both “L’Chaim” (from “Fiddler on the Roof”) and “Those Were The Days,” the Romany-inspired pop hit of 1968. Lines like, “So take your chances; there are no answers / Hope for the best, expect the worst” somehow seem more pertinent than ever — and that’s no joke.