National Geographic Channel visits a rural Brazilian town where "the 80 households in a one-square-mile area have reportedly some 38 pairs of twins. Blond, blue-eyed twins." Nat Geo then attempts to trace rumors connecting that creepy phenomenon to Nazi medical monster Joseph Mengele, who was on the lam in Brazil in the 1950s.
The Führer Returns to Berlin, This Time Saluted Only by Laughs
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
