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‘I said there was no reason to make it a musical!’ Mel Brooks on The Producers’ West End transfer


Veteran director, who originally opposed adapting 1967 film for the stage, is ‘very proud’ as Menier Chocolate Factory production will move to London’s Garrick theatre

The New York Times called it a “sublimely ridiculous spectacle” – a sentiment echoed by UK critics in 2004 and again when director Patrick Marber staged the first major London revival last year. He and his accountant, Leopold Bloom (Antolin), hire a neo-Nazi playwright, an incompetent director and a useless lead actor in the hope of closing the show and keeping their investors’ money. Dianne Pilkington, centre, in Young Frankenstein by Mel Brooks at the Garrick theatre, London, in 2017 Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The GuardianBrooks, who was born in 1926 and served as a combat engineer in the second world war (“I mostly ducked”), has seen nearly a century’s worth of authoritarian rulers come and go.

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