It is one of the sassiest lines in one of the most deliciously perverse songs in one of the most irreverent movies in Hollywood history.
“Don’t be stupid, be a smarty, come and join the Nazi Party!” actors sing in the number, “Springtime for Hitler,” the musical highlight of Mel Brooks’ 1968 movie and current Broadway hit, “The Producers.”
On Thursday, “The Producers” will debut onstage in what at first blush seems the unlikeliest of places.
In Israel. In Hebrew.
In a nation created out of the Holocaust, where at least a quarter-million survivors of the catastrophe still live, it is — to say the least — a bold artistic and commercial move.
Vulgar? High-stepping dancing girls dressed as Nazi storm troopers.
Tasteless? “Not many people knew it, but the Fuhrer was a terrific dancer,” says the show’s unrepentant Nazi turned -playwright.
Obscene? “That ‘s exactly why we want to produce this play. To show the world the true Hitler, the Hitler you loved, the Hitler you knew, the Hitler with a song in his heart,” declares the show’s washed-up Broadway producer, Max Bialystock.
No worries
Omri Nitzan, artistic director of Tel Aviv’s state-supported Cameri Theatre, which obtained Brooks’s blessing and bought the rights to stage the play, said he is not worried.
“The Israeli audience is open to controversy. It is also a mature audience with a sense of humor. I don’t see any problems except for demagogues” and groups eager to seize the Israeli art community’s share of state funding, Nitzan said during an interview.
Judging by its recent gate receipts and popular acclaim, “The Producers” seems to have lost any capacity to offend in America.
The latest incarnation of Brooks’ story about two Jewish con men who scheme to get rich by staging a sure-to-flop Broadway musical glorifying Adolf Hitler debuted in theaters nationwide in the United States on Christmas Day.
After it opened in New York in 2001, the stage version of “The Producers” became the biggest Broadway hit in three decades. Playgoers reportedly paid up to $1,350 a ticket to see a madcap satire about Nazi Germany and show business that went on to win a record 12 Tony Awards.
Brooks has been invited to attend the play’s Israeli opening Thursday, but whether the audacity of his award-winning script similarly charms Israelis remains to be seen, despite Nitzan’s note of confidence.
After all, six decades after the end of World War II, the trauma of the Holocaust is still fresh here.
The murder of 6 million Jews pervades the life of Israel, where an estimated one in three people is either a Holocaust survivor or a descendent of one. The sight of the aniline blue numbers that the Nazis tattooed on the arms of detainees is not uncommon.
“The Holocaust is very much alive,” said Avner Shalev, chairman of Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial. “The wounds are still there. The scars are still there. The influence is still there.”
Now, a little less than a year after some Israeli cabinet ministers and lawmakers threatened to boycott a speech by the German president, saying they could not bear hearing German spoken in Israel’s parliament, an Israeli theater company will stage the “gay romp with Adolf and Eva Braun at Berchtesgaden,” the fuhrer’s one-time alpine retreat in southern Germany.
Alterations
The Israeli version of “The Producers” will be altered only slightly. There will be fewer Nazi symbols. Instead of swastikas pinned to the dancers’ bust lines, for example, toy cannon barrels will be affixed instead.
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Also, after each of the first several mentions of Hitler’s name, the cast will intone “Yimach Sho Ve’zichro” — a curse that is usually uttered during the Jewish festival of Purim and means, “May his name and memory be erased.”
“After the first few times, I think the audience will join in,” Nitzan said.
Script alterations aside, the key question, of course, is whether the audience will laugh.
After it was released in 1968, the original “Producers” movie became a cult classic in Israel just as it did in the United States.
Young viewers such as Nitzan, the son of a Treblinka death-camp survivor, crowded into art houses such as the now defunct Paris Theatre in Tel Aviv to see it again and again.
“The movie had this kind of wild, nonsensical, radical attitude to things. I liked the provocation of `Springtime for Hitler.”‘
For Israelis, though, the laughter is different, suggested author Tom Segev, who has written extensively about the effects of the Holocaust on contemporary Israel.
Laughing is inspired not only by the outrageous and by innocent human foibles. It can be an expression of helplessness and sorrow, a way of coping with tragedy.
So unlike many American audiences who crack up at the coarse descriptions of Hitler, homosexuals and women in “The Producers,” the reaction of many Israelis will be bittersweet, Segev said.
“Israelis may be able to laugh at `The Producers,’ but it will be a sad laugh,” he said. “By no means will anyone in Israel take it lightly.”
The Holocaust is the key to Israel’s concept of its national security and woven into the nation’s institutional fabric.
Thousands of Israeli high school students and members of the Israeli military’s officer corps visit Auschwitz and Nazi death camps each year to connect with its lessons.
Visiting foreign leaders and dignitaries are, as a matter of course, guided through the country’s holocaust memorial to be shown the scope of the catastrophe.
Officials of the Cameri Theatre are undeterred. To be sure, solemn awe has been one Israeli reply to the Holocaust. But they point to another response to support their hunch that “The Producers” will raise more guffaws than hackles.
Besides silence and quiet grief, the Holocaust has been treated here with levity, irreverence and sometimes cruelty.
`Soap people’
Newly arrived Holocaust survivors in the late 1940s and early 1950s were teased as “soap people” by other Jews already living here. Their suffering was viewed as a blemish on the image of the new, heroic Jews who would fight for their lives.
“We all had an attraction to humor about Germany and Hitler, to forbidden jokes — not politically correct humor,” Nitzan recalled. “We had a long list of jokes about the Holocaust.”
Though no one is proud of it, Nitzan said, the slicing humor is understandable. Although they made it to these shores, Holocaust survivors walked about their new homeland clanking the chains of memory and terror that still shackled them.
Their awful burden fell perhaps most heavily on their children, who experienced firsthand the incandescent rage or the brooding silence or the need to describe what they had suffered. For them, Holocaust humor, however tasteless and vulgar, was sometimes the only release.
“The function of the humor was to go into the dark areas in another way,” Nitzan said. “It was, in a way, a process of liberating yourself, to get yourself free from the trauma and get yourself free from worshiping the trauma.”
`Beautiful’ reception
In 1997, Italian comedian and filmmaker Roberto Benigni came to Israel to debut his lighthearted but poignant drama about the Holocaust “Life Is Beautiful,” and the Oscar-winning film was generally well received.
Five years later, in early 2002 when the second Palestinian uprising was in full swing, the top-rated show on Israeli television was a “Saturday Night Live”-inspired revue that routinely used satire and gallows humor to describe Israelis living under the threat of suicide bombers.
“A society that could laugh and make a satire about terror in the middle of a terrorist war won’t have trouble laughing at `The Producers,”‘ said Samuel Freedman, a professor of journalism at Columbia University in New York.
Thus, after a summer when the Holocaust became political fodder again, when opponents of Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip wore orange stars mimicking the yellow stars that Nazis forced Jews to wear and likened the withdrawal of settlers from Gaza to Jews being forced to board trains bound for German concentration camps, a few guffaws at the late Fuhrer’s expense may not cause much of a ripple.