This country is so earnest sometimes that even the arrival, finally, of Mel Brooks’s slapstick musical adaptation of his cult classic film “The Producers” has provoked newspapers here to rehash the eternal question.
Eight years after conquering Broadway and then much of the rest of the world (it just invaded Moscow), the show rolled into town on Sunday night. It’s booked for a two-month run at the Admiralspalast, where Adolf himself liked to take an occasional break from invading Poland and France to enjoy light operettas from the Führer’s box.
The crowd for the premiere seemed pleased. It wasn’t your typical Broadway musical audience, to judge from the number of smart-looking young people with interesting haircuts. A “lively counterpoint to Hollywood productions like ‘Valkyrie’ and ‘Defiance,’ with their impeccable Resistance heroes and clichés,” decided the reviewer for Spiegel Online.
“The New York triumph was repeated in Berlin,” concluded the newspaper Tagesspiegel.
“Celebrated effusively by Berlin standards,” observed Stern magazine, the production nevertheless caused some theatergoers to wonder “whether it was really necessary to have so much Nazi paraphernalia onstage.” That’s not to mention the little Nazi flags with pretzels in lieu of swastikas that were handed out to everybody in the audience (including a troop of dirndled transvestites who waved them around like lost cheerleaders).
“Should one be allowed to laugh about Hitler?” The Berliner Morgenpost worried needlessly a few days earlier.
“People in Tel Aviv laughed,” answered The Berliner Zeitung
complete article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/19/theater/19abroad.html?_r=1&hpw
1 comments:
I was reading this article now. Hmmmm that is a difficult question to me. I did not hear about that musical before, just now when I read this article.
Yes, the Germans are too serious sometimes, though I personally cannot laugh at Hitler. Too cruel was this man and his regime, too terrible what it brought over us and I am too angry at those stupid, ignorant people (even if some of those people have been to university, educated and claim to be intelligent, to me they are stupid because of their attitude) from the past and at Neo-Nazis (wherever in the world) today. Another question is "could I laugh at this musical" - maybe, I would have to see it. And if I would see it with distance, understanding that this is just a musical, ironic, jiust making fun of Hitler.
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