Everybody who sees ’The Producers’, and that should be as close to everybody as the Gaiety Theatre allows, is hard-pressed to choose one favourite bit from the sublimely ridiculous spectacle produced by the Douglas Choral Union this week.

My favourites? Adolf Hitler having his Judy Garland moment, and of course the high kicking jack-booted Nazi storm troopers and all those demure, oversexed little old ladies using their aluminum walkers to tap-dance.

I can’t forget David Dawson bringing out the Fred Astaire in his nerd like character or Simon Fletcher as Max Bialystock, in his most delicious performance ever as the conniving con man who corrupts the sweetly innocent Leopold Bloom.

This show about producing the worst play guaranteed to lose money turns out to be a paean to the Third Reich, ’Springtime for Hitler’,by one Franz Liebkind (Mike Bonner), a pigeon-keeping Nazi. To add to this disgrace they choose for the worst of all possible directors the theatre queen to end all theatre queens, the lavender-voiced Roger De Bris (an almost unrecognizable David Artus), first seen in a ballgown and headdress setting the tone for everything that follows; fast, fierce, shameless, vulgar and altogether blissful.

David Dawson’s accountant Leopold Bloom is seduced by down on his luck Theatre Impressario Max Bialystock into breaking the law, and somehow Dawson manages to make his hunched introvert into an extrovert, remaining deadpan and thus hysterically funny.

There’s even a dancer-reflecting mirror for the big Nazi numbers, which then turns into a crucial visual aid in for the Busby Berkeley-style formation dancing with gleefully over-the-top re-workings of the classic Ziegfeld beauty parades

There should be plenty in ’The Producers’ to offend. You could start with the characterization of the effete Roger De Bris and his Village People-like artistic crew and there’s Ulla (the gloriously camp Lisa Kreisky), playing the ultimate sex machine of a Swedish secretary with the requisite unpronounceable name.

It seems inevitable that a show that keeps trying to top itself is eventually going to hit the ceiling. And after the ’Springtime for Hitler’ musical-within-the-musical sequence, which fulfills one’s wildest expectations, ’The Producers’ can’t really get any bigger, though it works hard at attempting it.

’The Producers’ has taken what could have been overblown camp into a far warmer realm in which affection always outweighs irony. Who wants coolness, anyway, when you can have such blood-quickening heat?

Fiona Helleur