It’s a masterpiece

The Producers, Palace, Manchester, to Saturday

JUST occasionally you have to see a solid gold masterpiece so you can reset your critical faculties. This is that masterpiece.

Watching Mel Brooks’ hilarious movie-turned-stage comedy helps you to see where other shows come in the greatness pecking order‚ and most trail in its wake.

The writer/director throws every bad-taste joke he could come up with into the mix, then adds a few more. Jeremy Clarkson could take lessons.

The subject is, of course, Nazis. Specifically Hitler. More specifically “Springtime for Hitler”, a romp with Adolf through World War II, the show written in the late Sixties when “gay” could just about still mean light-hearted but which — as anyone who sees this work is left in no doubt — doesn’t here.

Broadway flop producer Max Bialystock (the superb Cory English) and his accountant, the shy, obsessive Leo Bloom (Jason Manford, the baby-faced comedian with a brilliant singing voice — who knew?), come up with an idea.

If they can deliberately set up a bad show, get it massively oversubscribed by old-lady backers and have it close on opening night, they could cut out with the remaining cash.

Cue the search for an awful show and its Nazi-sympathising writer (the also-hilarious Phill Jupitus), an appalling and ultra-camp director (David Bedella) and his even more camp assistant Carmen Ghia (Louie Spence) and the lovely leading lady and receptionist Ulla (Tiffany Groves), and Brooks’ carefully-built tower of fun crashes and burns — because the show is so bad it’s good, and might run for years.

Along the way Brooks’ comic genius shines in mad scenes and general brilliance — in the middle of act two he needs a showstopper so wrote a solo song for Bialystock in which he relates the entire plot of the show to that point in a couple of manic minutes, and brings the house down.

Okay, this new Adam Spiegel production doesn’t have the money or the scale of the original and English, while still magnificent, isn’t quite as energetic as when I first saw him a decade or more ago. But as I said at the top, Brooks created a masterpiece here: everyone should see it at least once to see how it’s done.

What I really want to know is whether Brooks has abandoned his plan to turn “Young Frankenstein” into a musical. The world needs it.