THE PRODUCERS BY CHRIS WANGLER

132 MINUTES | OPENS DECEMBER 25 | PROVIDENCE PLACE 16 + SHOWCASE

Cut and pasted directly from the Broadway smash, with many of the same personnel, Susan Stroman’s bloated version of The Producers offers proof that you can almost entertain an audience into submission. One boisterous number follows another, and by the time "Prisoners of Love" rolls around, you feel as if you’d had too much champagne. The story unites a washed-up producer (Nathan Lane) and a corruptible accountant (Matthew Broderick) as the architects of a backfiring get-rich-quick scheme. Neither actor shines as bright as Uma Thurman playing the Swedish secretary or Gary Beach and Roger Bart as the queenly director of Springtime for Hitler and his "common-law assistant," who push gay caricature to wrist-snapping heights. Purists will miss the crassness and chutzpah that made Mel Brooks’s 1968 film a cult item, but the Technicolor palette and zany absurdity seem fresh in the wake of over-serious, drearily colored star vehicles like Chicago and Moulin Rouge.