Teuton come-on The Producers returns to Boston BY LLOYD SCHWARTZ
	The Producers By Mel Brooks and Thomas Meehan. Music and lyrics by Mel Brooks. Direction and choreography by Susan Stroman. Set by Robin Wagner. Costumes by William Ivey Long. Lighting by Peter Kaczorowski. Conducted by Steven Tyler. With Bob Amaral, Andy Taylor, Rich Affannato, Ida Leigh Curtis, Stuart Marland, and Bill Nolte. At the Colonial Theatre through March 6.

One of the sublime comic moments in film is the "Springtime for Hitler" production number in Mel Brooks’s The Producers. For the chutzpah of its bad taste, Brooks’s send-up of bad Broadway musicals — Nazi showgirls singing a Teuton come-on ("We’re moving to a faster pace/Look out, here comes the Master Race!") — is one of his most inspired inventions. "Springtime" (the title is a take-off on the perennial summer-stock comedy Springtime for Henry) is the apotheosis of the plan triggered by Leo Bloom (Leopold Bloom!), the nebbishy accountant who in the course of going over the books of producer Max Bialystock (a perpetual failure, initials MB) mentions that he could make more money with a flop than a hit. (Over-capitalize, offering each backer a huge percentage of the profits, which will be nonexistent when the show folds.) So Max and Leo try to produce a foolproof bomb — a Nazi musical. "How could a show about Nazis be a hit," Bialy asks, "when half the audience are Jews?" But the audience (us!) takes the insane awfulness for hilarious satire. It’s irresistible. "Where did we go right?" our heroes lament.

Three decades after making the movie, Brooks turned it into an actual Broadway musical, winning a record-breaking 12 Tonys. "Springtime for Hitler," expanded for Broadway, may be even more devastating on a real stage than it was in the film. Statuesque Ziegfeld girls descend a glittering staircase balancing headdresses with huge pretzels, knockwursts, beer steins, and Walküre horns. A huge mirror opens behind the dancers and, in a Busby Berkeley nightmare, the chorus circles the stage forming a giant swastika as the recorded voice of Mel Brooks himself advises: "Don’t be stupid, be a smarty,/Come and join the Nazi Party!"

Brooks wants to offend every minority: Jews, African-Americans (a black cop has an Irish accent), and especially gays. In the movie, Brooks’s first directorial effort, the gay jokes were a little disturbing for their underlying homophobia — Bloom is terrified the nelly director, Roger De Bris, or his limp-wristed assistant, Carmen Ghia, might make a pass at him. In the show, the gay characters are even broader stereotypes, more grotesque, yet oddly less offensive. Also less funny. The show’s big love song, " ’Til Him" ("No one ever made me feel like someone . . . ’Til him"), another example of Brooks’s satire by inversion, is sung by Max and Leo about each other.

Brooks the writer, at his best, is a master tickler. As a composer, he’s more of a parodist. His title song for Blazing Saddles is a spot-on send-up of Frankie Laine hits. (And it’s sung by Frankie Laine.) In The Producers, aside from "Springtime for Hitler," the songs are so generic — a little Loesser, a little Rodgers, a little Gershwin, a little Sondheim ("Little Old Lady Land" mimics the "Loveland" sequence of Follies), more than a little Jule Styne (Max’s "Betrayed" is Brooks’s version of Ethel Merman’s self-justifying "Rose’s Turn" monologue at the end of Gypsy) — that they never quite take on a life of their own.

And yet, as the national company road show, which has just returned to the Colonial Theatre for a two-week run, demonstrates, the flaws don’t much matter. The Producers is so funny, even the sets make you giggle, like the posters of Max’s past shows hanging in his seedy office: The Kidney Stone, and its sequel, This Too Shall Pass. The costumes for "Springtime for Hitler" alone are worth the price of admission. The dances — like the number for little old ladies with taps on their walkers — are a continual delight. How rare to see a new musical with so many songs and so much dancing. "Springtime for Hitler" is almost anticlimactic coming after so many other musical numbers.

Susan Stroman directs the show as a breathless farce, a machine so well-oiled, the movements so thoroughly choreographed, the performers have little chance to screw up. Or breathe. Bob Amaral (Max, more Walter Matthau than the film’s Zero Mostel or Broadway’s Nathan Lane) and Andy Taylor (less defined as Bloom than Gene Wilder or Matthew Broderick, who supplied their own endearing schnookiness), work very hard to get the laughs, though they bypass the underlying humanity. Blonde, busty, long-legged Ida Leigh Curtis is a hoot as Ulla, Max and Leo’s oversexed Swedish "receptionist." Conductor Steven Tyler keeps up a fast musical pace, and the orchestra is always with him. The amplification at the Colonial, aggressively loud, often blurs the diction. What’s the use of being able to hear the singers if you can’t make out the words?