Brady, the musical conductor of The Producers since its opening on Broadway, also served as the film’s orchestra conductor, vocal arranger and resident lip-synch police, carefully scrutinizing each actor’s performance so that all the performers’ vocals were perfectly in synch.
For “Springtime for Hitler” and “Prisoners of Love,” the filmmakers enlisted veteran lighting designers JULES FISHER and PEGGY EISENHAUER, who individually and together have been responsible for lighting many of Broadway’s biggest hits, along with countless live concert shows. Eisenhauer explains, “One of the things we’re able to provide is a moving lighting landscape that works with the choreography. What we do is change the quality, the composition and the colors, all live for the camera. So it’s almost like a performance of light that unfolds alongside the dancers.”
“Along Came Bialy” now features more than 50 little old ladies with walkers dancing in Central Park and across Fifth Avenue. “There’s nothing like blocking off traffic on Fifth Avenue for six hours in the middle of the day,” Minsky quips.
When the company moved onto the streets for a week in April, the stylized world that had been carefully crafted on the stages followed the production into the city, with its colorful trees and floral blossoms. “It’s not just Central Park,” notes Minsky. “It’s our version of Central Park.”
There were other opportunities to cinematically expand moments from the stage version. For example, when the incarcerated Bialystock receives Bloom’s postcard from Rio, Brooks and Meehan were inspired by such classic Donen and Kelly movie musicals as On the Town and Singin’ in the Rain to fashion silent vignettes which illustrated in somewhat exaggerated style Bloom and Ulla enjoying their new life together in paradise. Later, as part of Bialystock’s tour de force soliloquy, “Betrayed,” the songwriter even borrowed images from the Gary Cooper film Sergeant York (his first name was Alvin) for a bit where Bialystock reminisces about his childhood, only to discover that it isn’t his past that he is remembering.
A longtime fan of stage and movie musicals, producer Sanger had always felt disappointed that he didn’t live in the era when the big studio musicals were made. “I hope that The Producers will help others to get made,” he says.
“Movie people are used to measuring things in feet and inches, but now we measure them in bars and notes. Stroman will tell me that she needs a 12-bar hallway. And that’s the way it’s been.” -Mark Friedberg
When Sanger and co-producer Amy Herman first began to scout locations for the film and hire a crew for a February 2005 start date, Susan Stroman suggested that this particular production be a hybrid of people from both the theater and film worlds. Rather than a culture clash, the worlds of theater and movies seemed to blend together seamlessly.
“I feel like we’ve had the best of Broadway and the best of New York movie-making come together,” says Stroman. “It has been a perfect cross-fertilization of both mediums. We’ve learned from one another and even enjoyed the different terminology. Eventually, the cameramen learned to say, ‘Please move downstage or move upstage.’”
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