Dad: This should be great! I loved The Producers! And I don’t really care for musical theater!

Mom: This should be great! I loved The Producers! And I love musical theater!

Brother: I’m going to judge the entire show based on the first number.

Me: The Producers was really funny … but can a show based on a gothic novel that has been misinterpreted since its publication be anywhere near as good?

Dad: Maybe we should have made the kids see the movie before the show …

It begins …

Me: Okay … interesting set, costumes and lighting ….

Brother: This is horrible. I will now spend the remaining two hours and 20 minutes trying to spot instances of Roger Bart’s back hurting.

Megan Mullally enters …

Mom: Well, she’s been taking care of herself since Will & Grace.

Dad: Sexual humor! Yes! Mel Brooks has still got it!

Me: Oh, look, they cast Karen from Will & Grace in a Broadway show! I didn’t realize fictional characters were being hired for supporting roles these days. … Do they pay them in Monopoly money?

Dad: I have never seen that actress before in my life. The rest of the family doesn’t look particularly amused. Am I missing something? She keeps touching her chest; is that a recurring shtick?

“A Roll in The Hay” …

Mom: What clever use of video and interesting choreography! Sutton Foster is great as the Ulla character.

Dad: Ha-ha! More sexual innuendo! And I recognize that line from the movie!

Me: Mel Brooks really has a thing for leggy blonde shiksas. Susan Stroman just corrupted every hay ride I have ever been on and will never go on in the future. Thanks a lot. Now my future children will never know the joy that is sitting in the back of a damp wooden cart.

Brother: I can’t believe I’m watching a show where the jokes thus far have been an even split between sexual humor and vowel/name pronunciation. What is this, seventh grade?

“Join the Family Business” …

Dad: This is a bit campy for me.

Mom: This is a bit campy, even for me.

Brother: Hope no one will be disturbed when I check my BlackBerry.

Me: Interesting number, but are we really only halfway through act one? Oh look, my brother’s checking his e-mail.

“Life, Life” …

Me: It’s almost as if the Igor character’s sole purpose is to waste time. And why does he have a British accent? Isn’t he from Transylvania Heights? If everyone else has to be faux-German, so should he.

INTERMISSION

Entre’act

Brother: Why is Mel Brooks so obsessed with Germany and German music?

“Surprise” …

Me: The hero’s fiancée shows up right as he’s falling for his leggy lab assistant. No one saw that one coming …

Dad: This Megan Mullally person is hysterical! That high-pitched voice, socialite demeanor, and quasi-lesbian tendencies!

Mom: Karen Walker comes to Transylvania. Sigh.

“Please Send Me Someone” …

Brother: Where the hell did this blind guy come from?

Dad: I’m confused … who is this blind guy?

Mom: …

Me: I have no idea who that blind guy is.

“Puttin’ on the Ritz” …

Dad: Straight outta the movie.

Mom: The choreography is great! It’s no Springtime for Hitler though.

Brother: The strobe lights definitely give the second act an advantage over the first.

Me: This number makes me want to take a dance class. Did I bring my tap shoes to the city?

“Deep Love” …

Dad: I’m officially over the sexual humor.

Mom: Me, too.

Me: Me, three.

Brother: The market was down 360 points today.

Finale Ultimo

Dad: That was pretty long. Entertaining, though. Mel Brooks kind of still has it.

Me: My mom didn’t ask if I want a souvenir T-shirt. That’s never a good sign. And if my brother gets to say “Puttin’ on the Ritz” the same way the monster does three more times, then it’s over. I can’t listen to “PUGHINNNN ONGA RIIIIIII” the entire way home.

Brother: At least I have a new way to annoy everyone.

Dr. Frankenstein (“That’s Fronken-steen!”) has taken over a village theater—Loew’s Transylvania Heights—to introduce his reborn Monster to the public. “And now, ladies and gentlemen, from what was only an inarticulate mass of lifeless tissue, I give you a cultured, sophisticated man about town. Hit it!”

Whereupon the conductor strikes up the orchestra. And Frankenstein sings Irving Berlin’s immortal lyrics—

If you’re blue,

And don’t know where to go to,

Why don’t you go

Where fashion sits …

And the clumping Monster suddenly joins in like a tuneless, slow-witted Boris Karloff with—

Puttin’ on the Ritz!

Then he tap-dances in white tie and tails—tries to tap-dance—like Fred Astaire in the great, effortless number from Blue Skies (1946). It’s a deliriously funny moment and a perfect musical sendup of vintage monster movies.

Then the sequence builds and builds when Ms. Stroman brings on a chorus of chic monsters in their white tie and tails to join in the fun. The tap-dancing Monster himself is now gaining confidence! Not only that—he’s good! Furthermore, we’re glad for him. He’s in love with showbiz! We’re on his side.

The Monster is brilliantly played by Shuler Henley, and the gleeful look he gives the poor lug’s stagestruck eyes is something to behold. He’s alive! (Truly.) And the glorious sequence proves what we know about Mel Brooks: When he’s on a roll, he’s unbeatable (and unstoppable).

Ms. Stroman’s version of “Puttin’ on the Ritz” is exactly in tune with his infectious lunacy. She even escalates the number by adding another Astaire tribute, the classic “Bojangles of Harlem” dance sequence from Swing Time (1936): The Monster ends up tap-dancing like a trouper in expert competition with his own monstrous shadow.

THAT ONE JOYFULLY spontaneous number apart, where did Young Frankenstein go wrong?

The sputtering production is far from Susan Stroman’s best work. As a choreographer, her flair for pastiche shines during “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” but it amounts to little more than generally exuberant filler elsewhere. Her staging of “Roll in the Hay” is raunchy fun. (“When spirits are saggin’/ Just jump in a wagon”—music and lyrics by Mel Brooks.) But she repeats herself by using the excuse of a new dance craze for two different numbers. The second, “Transylvania Mania,” is intended to close the first act with a bang, but in spirit it’s yet another Astaire pastiche—“The Continental,” from The Gay Divorcee (1934)—and it only promises to take off.

I’m afraid that Ms. Stroman’s work as director is also uneven. That closing act-one dance sequence, for example, is preceded by a little song, “Welcome to Transylvania,” though the show arrived in Transylvania seven scenes earlier.

The production is handsome, like a stylish facade, but the pace of the first act is sluggish. (Act two is better and funnier.) Only Mr. Brooks would write a slapstick scene between a Monster on the loose and a lonely blind hermit. Ms. Stroman’s direction of the farcical mayhem is uninspired—as if the laughter would come automatically. (Devotees of the movie obliged, laughing in advance.)

The director has also let her leading man disappear for long stretches. Roger Bart is a born comedian who makes us laugh on sight, but the production keeps shifting focus, leaving him stranded. Mr. Bart has only two or three songs to call his own—a Danny Kaye tongue twister is the less forgettable. Crucially, there’s no central relationship in the show to involve or touch us. Mr. Bart has no partner to play off—no Bialystock to his Bloom. It’s not the Monster (who ought to have his own ballad); nor Inga (Sutton Foster, who has three numbers before fading from view early in the second act); nor even loyal Igor, apart from the early—and charming—vaudevillian duet with Mr. Bart’s Frankenstein, “Together Again.”

Igor—the role made famous by the late great Marty Feldman—is marvelously played by Christopher Fitzgerald. Megan Mullally as the frigid Elizabeth—a role that Mr. Brooks and co-bookwriter Thomas Meehan have mistakenly rewritten as some kind of society dame—can’t erase the memory of Madeline Khan. (Who could?) Andrea Martin is a quiet riot as Frau Blücher, who makes terrified horses rear up whinnying at the mere mention of her name.

MEL BROOKS IS the Norman Mailer of comedy, a pugnacious little guy who comes out swinging. He’s written several enduring classics that changed the landscape; he’s unembarrassed to fail; he fires scattershot; and when he misses the target—boy, does he ever.

Young Frankenstein misses. Let it be said that the audience at the performance I attended seemed to be having a swell time. But for me, pastiche has its limits, and Mr. Brooks is now pastiching himself.

His unrestrained humor has never been subtle, but all the bouncy, generic tunes in the show sound more or less the same. (It’s one of the reasons we’re so happy to have a few minutes of Irving Berlin.) Mr. Brooks did much better with his pastiche score for The Producers, which paid “tribute’’ to many great composers (Kern, Porter and Lorenz Hart among them). He can be crude, it’s no secret, but too many of his songs here—“He Vas My Boyfriend,” “Deep Love”—go on to illustrate and repeat the jokes he’s already made. (And most of the jokes were in the movie: “What knockers!” et al.)

A musical comedy needs an intimate theater (like the St. James, where The Producers played)—not a soulless barn like Young Frankenstein’s home in the Hilton. Everything’s too loud. The cast has to push and oversell the comedy from its vast stage to the balcony a mile away.

Well, Mel Brooks never talked quietly. And Young Frankenstein isn’t so much a musical comedy as an unapologetic vaudevillian song-and-dance show—a series of hit-or-miss low comedy sketches, with a touch of burlesque thrown in: leggy showgirls in white panties and frilly garter belts.

Mel Brooks, the populist, will let The People decide the show’s fate—not miserable, sour critics. The reviews have been tepid, to say the least. But the unsinkable Mr. Brooks will declare, “See if I care!”

He’ll ignore every last flaw in the show, and say, with the faithful Igor, “What hump?”

Over at Salon, Paul Mazursky celebrates Mr. Brooks and describes their weekly lunch at Orso with Michael Gruskoff, Alan Ladd Jr., Jay Kanter, Freddie Fields. "The group seemed to be about the men who had toiled on the third floor at Twentieth Century Fox studios in the '70s," Mr. Mazursky wrote. He described the table as "an island of some relief and compassion for Mel" after Ms. Bancroft died.

The group went to a preview of Young Frankenstein and Mr. Brooks admitted that the third act needed work.

After all, it’s a free country. If our Mel wants to charge a king’s ransom to see a show, what’s it to you? It’s good to be the king. As Max Bialystock says gleefully to the wads of cash piled in his safe: “Hello, boys!”

As a free citizen in the greatest democracy in the world, Mel Brooks can charge the gullible public whatever he wants. (And he does). After all, it wasn’t too long ago that fainthearted theatergoers were outraged at the record $100 ticket on Broadway. And who first introduced it? Who set the trend that the rest of Broadway followed? Why, Mel Brooks and The Producers.

What short memories we all have! Don’t tell me that the ever buoyant, 81-year-old Mel isn’t an inspired leader. They say he doesn’t care about the little man, but I say Mel Brooks is a little man. There are those who accuse him of not caring about the real theater lovers of this proud city, but I say what’s the upper balcony for? There are even those who call him an opportunistic apostle of unacceptable greed. And to that I say, what’s an apostle?

The pioneering Mel Brooks did more than just introduce the $100 ticket with The Producers. He had the generosity of spirit to wait until all the reviews were in first. And did he stop there? As a typical way of thanking the public for its support, he introduced the world’s first $480 Premium ticket for busy corporate types who need the best tickets in a rush. How thoughtful is that? And what if you weren’t in a rush to see The Producers? Mel had something for you too. He introduced a second tier of $225 tickets for all the losers who couldn’t afford $480.

That’s the kind of guy Mel is. To be sure, there are killjoys who whisper that he didn’t bring about the revolution in Broadway prices all on his own. But I say give an innovator his due. There were several other producers of The Producers—but why should Rocco Landesman and his merry men share in the glory? Whose show is it, anyway?

There’s only one Mel Brooks. He signed off on The Producers deal without a thought for himself, bravely stepping forward as the poster boy for Broadway greed as every other producer on The Great White Way followed suit with their own exclusive Premium ticket prices. Mel has made an estimated $20 million from The Producers. Shouldn’t a man be rewarded for his work?

His jealous critics mutter darkly that Premium tickets are just another form of ticket scalping. But Mel and his fellow Broadway producers don’t see it that way. They believe they’re neutralizing the scalpers who are feeding off their blood. Mel Brooks isn’t scalping the public. He’s legitimizing a shady illegitimate business by offering a public service.

As composer, lyricist and co-writer of Young Frankenstein, Mel can be trusted to lead the way. He’s one of only two principal producers of the show and has the power, at last, to do what he’s always really wanted to do—reduce ticket prices. Yes, siree! We should praise Mel, not bury him. Look at the facts:

At $450 the Premier ticket is, in fact, $30 less than the top $480 ticket for The Producers six years ago! That’s not all. There are next-best Premium seats for our convenience at a mere $375 each—or $75 less than The Producers’ original Premium ticket! And the really good news is that all the remaining orchestra and dress circle seats are obviously a bargain at only $120 each.

So don’t tell me that Mel Brooks doesn’t care.

It’s true that the ticket you once thought was the best in the house is now only third best, but only if you look at it in an insecure way. And it’s a tad unfortunate that for $120 you could still find yourself sitting on the back row of the orchestra. That’s why you should always bring a good pair of binoculars with you just in case.

Oh, let’s not spoil things. There’s more good news about Young Frankenstein: The cost of the best seats will be reduced when it’s not a Friday or Saturday evening, or weekend matinee. Premium and Premier seats will go for $100 less during weekdays, when business is traditionally slower. What a break!

The cost of the standard $120 ticket remains constant, but only to avoid unnecessary confusion. Plus, there’ll be some seats in the first two neck-cricking rows on sale to really poor people, at $25. (Restrictions may apply: The deal’s off if it’s a national holiday; the Sabbath; a leap year; raining; looking like rain; a Wednesday or Thursday, or possibly a Friday; a very hot summer day; or otherwise a problem for anyone involved in the show, including Mel Brooks. Fair’s fair.)

Should Young Frankenstein prove a hit when it opens at the vast 1,821-seat Hilton Theatre on Nov. 8, Mel’s unprecedented share of the profits will amount to $5.2 million a year. A mere bag of shells until all the dough rolls in from future touring productions in the U.S. and around the world.

Do you appreciate the enormous gamble munificent Mel is taking? Though he might never give a sucker an even break, everything depends on the $16 million musical being a megahit in New York.

Nobody wishes a show ill. If Young Frankenstein is a success, I, for one, will surely celebrate. If it’s a monster hit, the latest Mel Brooks ticket-price scandal will soon be forgotten as the box office is besieged.

And all will be well again in paradise—right?

1:37, 1:39 a.m.

4 pounds, 10 ounces; 4 pounds, 14 ounces

Columbia Presbyterian Hospital

Alan Burdick is an editor at Discover, the science magazine, but his attitude toward the birth of his twins was far from objective. “I was probably like every father,” he said, “worried in advance about passing out and the sight of blood and all that.” It didn’t help that his wife, Susan Dominus, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, went into labor six weeks before her due date. “What’s happening now?” she kept demanding with a reportorial persistence. “How much longer is this going to take?” Mr. Burdick ultimately rallied and wound up cutting the umbilical cords of little Leo, who wields a Herculean grip on his toys (“He’s more the bouncer at the club door,” said the new pops), and Joshua, a li’l cut-up who was given the nickname “Mel Brooks” by his mom. “It’s bizarre,” Mr. Burdick mused. “You go into the hospital as a couple, and the next day you aren’t a couple, but you don’t really feel like a family—whatever the hell a family is.”

That takes care of me. But what about you ? I enjoy Mr. Rudnick's high and low camp, up to a point. But that point is usually reached by intermission. By then, Mr. Rudnick's smart jokes in bad taste will have hit and missed at the rate of about 60 a minute, and he will have hammered his latest camp frolic into the ground.

I have never taken Mr. Rudnick's plays seriously, though some do, including Mr. Rudnick. He has in mind that he's a thinker, a dramatist of ideas and even a playwright of revolutionary significance. Tell that to his Mr. Charles of Palm Beach or to his gay version of Adam and Eve, Adam and Steve. Jeffrey was admired on a deeper level. But, as I see it, the witty Mr. Rudnick always achieves the reverse of everything he claims to be doing. He doesn't satirize homosexual stereotypes; he reinforces them.

He's the Mel Brooks of Off Broadway. The exuberant theme song of The Producers , "Keep It Gay"-"Keep it light / Keep it bright / Keep it gay!"-could easily be sung by one and all in Valhalla . But what about this?

The fleet's in, but who's in the fleet?

We'll be Ethel Mermans

And crush all those Germans

By singing them into defeat!

That catchy little ditty wasn't written by Mel Brooks-who is believed to be straight and ridiculously proud of it-but by Mr. Rudnick, who's gay and ridiculously proud of it. Entitled "Soldiers and Seamen" (geddit?), the vaudevillian song is performed by two hunky gay sailors in Valhalla 's tribute to vintage movies like Anchors Aweigh .

The dear old British theater has been doing this sort of thing for years, since the World War II shows entitled Soldiers in Skirts . So has Off Broadway. The late Charles Ludlam, our genius of high camp, did it best of all at his Ridiculous Theatre Company of beloved memory. But the bloated Valhalla , which Mr. Rudnick has dressed up as an exploration of aesthetics via mad King Ludwig II of Bavaria, is a shadow of Ludlam's innovative work. It's an overwritten gay romp.

Not that the dramatist's customary scattershot wit isn't on display: "Inner beauty is tricky," declares the prom queen, "because you can't prove it …."

"You are dressed like a nun!" the Queen of Bavaria chastises her rebellious 10-year-old son.

"I know that!" he replies.

"Then act like one!"

But the comedy itself strains for effect in its overlapping stories. There's the tale of the nutty aesthete Ludwig-No. 1 Wagner fan, builder of 19th-century fairy-tale castles and swan fetishist-and there's James, the predatory gay boy from 1940's small-town Texas who has a thing about a glass swan. Mr. Rudnick is trying to make a link between over-the-top gay fantasies and … over-the-top gay fantasies. He succeeds. But in spite of a certain exoticism provided by heart-stopping blasts of Wagner and references to lunatic rococo grottos, the parallel plots essentially look like the same old stereotypical plots:

Attractive gay stud hates mother in Texas; is friend of repressed high-school jock who is now engaged to secretly flighty prom queen; nude scene in locker room; boy gets boy; now soldiers, they end up in Valhalla, where former jock is overwhelmed by Gothic guilt and comes permanently out of the closet; hurrah! But tragic end, sort of.

And there's Mr. Rudnick's potentially more interesting story, set in 19th-century Bavaria: Queen becomes king; hates mother; worships style, surface beauty, Versailles, fabrics and Wagner; prone to fainting rapturously; builds castles in the air that become the prototype for Walt Disney's Magic Kingdom castle, in case you didn't know; is briefly engaged to insecure princess with hump; hurrah! But eventually declared insane for crimes against fantasy. Tragic end, sort of.

"Do you foresee a day when a straight-nongay-play can't get on Broadway?" Mr. Rudnick was asked in a recent Times interview.

"God willing," he replied.

Dream on! Mr. Rudnick's giggly triumphalism in the phony war between so-called gay and straight plays is meant to goad or amuse us. But it's just silliness. Some of us-straight, gay or hermaphrodite-are tiring of bad gay plays, that's all. Valhalla is one of them. From the genius-fascist Wagner's mouth to God's ear to … Paul Rudnick?!! There's a difference between camp and talent kissed by God, a difference between great beauty and whimsical artifice. But Mr. Rudnick doesn't seem to notice. "Well, you only have equal rights when you have equal trash," he told The Times about gay culture entering the mainstream of American life.

It isn't true. You only have equal trash in a politically correct climate when it's given equal rights because it's gay. Trash is trash in any culture. (And some trash is better than others.) Why does Mr. Rudnick wish to make mainstream America his artistic Valhalla? Who in their right, independent mind wants to belong to a blanded-out, Botoxed culture that celebrates "artistic" queer pets for uptight straight guys?

The stereotyping of both gays and straights in the culture trivializes them both. Mr. Rudnick's jokes about blindness, humps and clubfeet are neither here nor there; his awful tour guide to Valhalla in spandex tackiness, named Natalie Kippelbaum, is sophomore stuff. But for a play that's essentially about magical beauty, there's little magic in this threadbare production.

William Ivey Long's costumes are fine, but the boys in the royal bed at Ludwig's imitation Versailles look as if they've stopped for a night in a motel. Doubtless there are budget constraints at New York Theatre Workshop, but a few handheld mirrors do not a Hohenschwangau Castle make. The cast of Valhalla is fun, and I wish they and we could have had more fun. The director is Christopher Ashley, with Peter Frechette as hysterical King Ludwig.

Mr. Felder, a Canadian concert pianist and actor who also wrote his rousing tribute to Gershwin, is appearing in George Gershwin Alone at the Helen Hayes Theatre–right next door to the St. James Theatre, where The Producers , greatest show in the history of the whole wide beautiful world, is packing them in.

I'm glad to say that Hershey Felder is doing all right, too. Or so it seemed when I took in a recent matinee of his show, which he describes as "a play with music." I love matinees. They're like playing hooky from school. An interviewer asked Gershwin one time, "Didn't you play anything when you were a boy?" "Only hooky," he replied.

Take it from me. It's never too late to start. But there! At exactly the same time as I was going in to catch the matinee of George Gershwin Alone along with a rather solemn crowd–a serious crowd, like a respectful audience at a public memorial service–uproar was going on next door as the overexcited mob jostled its way in to see The Producers , thrilled out of their minds to have scored a ticket. Naturally, I felt a pang. I hadn't seen The Producers in at least two entire weeks. But what use was that to Hershey Felder?

Besides, he turned out to be a relaxed, very likable performer in his Broadway debut, although he's clearly more at home at the piano than when, strictly speaking, he's acting. Mr. Felder not only plays Gershwin, he looks like him. His script, however, is a pretty conventional, reverent narrative, taking the great man's life and music from young prodigy discovered by Al Jolson, to misunderstood laureate of the Jazz Age, to early death at 38.

"It was 1919. Woodrow Wilson was still President …," Hershey Felder informs us at the start, before segueing into "Swanee" on the Steinway, followed by Gershwin's greatest hits, though not all of them. (There wouldn't be time.) George Gershwin, I learned, was born Morris Gershovitz. Then again, Mel Brooks was born Melvin Kaminsky. Forgive the digression, but I can't resist: One day Mel Brooks was visiting London, and English friends of his decided to take him for dinner to the exclusive, venerable old gentleman's club called Brooks. When the waiter came over to his table, Mr. Brooks asked him: "What did this place used to be called before?" And the waiter explained, "It's always been called Brooks, sir." "Not me," he replied cheerfully. "I used to be Kaminsky!"

No disrespect to Hershey Felder, but Mel Brooks has more in common with the Gershwin family than is widely supposed. George's Russian-immigrant father is surely a kindred spirit. He used to refer to Rhapsody in Blue as "Rhapsody in Jews." There's also a surprising link with George's brother, Ira–who was among the poetic geniuses of colloquial sophistication in the pantheon of great American lyricists. In an intriguing part of Mr. Felder's show, he demonstrates how Ira substituted dummy lyrics to "I Got Rhythm" until inspiration struck. So the unforgettable words to the unforgettable melody first went:

Roly poly

Eating solely

Ravioli

Better watch your diet or bust!

Mel Brooks writes dummy lyrics, too–except he keeps them!

I always had the biggest hits,

The biggest bathrooms at the Ritz,

My showgirls had the biggest tits!

I never was the pits in any way!

That's our Mel! Though Hershey Felder doesn't mention it, I believe the Gershwins kept a dummy lyric only once–and famously. It was, of course, "Blah, Blah, Blah," the ballad from their 1931 Delicious , explaining how a theme song is rhymed:

Blah, blah, blah, blah, moon,

Blah, blah, blah, above;

Blah, blah, blah, blah, croon,

Blah, blah, blah, blah, love.

Mr. Felder performs unmiked, which could be unique on Broadway today. His George Gershwin Alone might not set the world on fire, but it's a pleasant, heartfelt tribute to the genius who composed the 1924 jazz anthem "Oh, Lady Be Good," the 1935 folk opera Porgy and Bess and the 1924 concerto masterpiece Rhapsody in Blue . It's a modest show, even so, performed without intermission and lasting only 90 minutes.

As I came out of the Helen Hayes Theatre, the audience next door at The Producers was having a cooling drink during intermission. "How can they possibly top the first act?" a couple was saying animatedly on the sidewalk outside the St. James Theatre as I headed home. But something drew me back.

When I confess to you what happened next, you will scarcely believe that a fellow in my exalted position would even contemplate it, let alone stoop to such a thing. But there's a long and honorable tradition in theatergoing known as "second acting." You "second act" by mingling innocently with the audience as it returns for Act II after the intermission, thereby seeing the rest of the show for free. Actors and other impoverished fanatics have been doing it for years. There are people who've "second acted" The Phantom of the Opera and don't even know why he's wearing a mask. And there's usually a good empty seat available at most theaters, or even a box. But they can spot you in a box.

"How can they possibly top the first act?" I heard myself confiding excitedly to no one in particular as I mingled with the audience returning for the second act of The Producers . Thank goodness I noticed I was still carrying my Playbill for George Gershwin Alone or the jig would have been up.

I was hoping to stand at the back of the theater, for surely no seats would be empty. (They weren't.) The million producers of The Producers provide 18 standing-room seats for each performance at $25 each–except Friday, Saturday and Sunday, when out of the kindness of their hearts the price goes up to $30. But the tickets for standing room sell out every day, although I didn't know that at the time.

The standing-room-only crowd know two big things about life, however. The first is that, for an exuberant, take-no-prisoners Broadway show like The Producers , standing room can be the best seat in the house. The electricity that comes from a happy audience actually rolls down to the stage from the back of the house. It's the most amazing thing. You don't just sense it. You see it, this wave–why, of love, of course.

The second big thing this band of brothers in standing room knows is that there's a first time for everyone. And so they don't fuss, making room for kindred spirits. True, I had missed Franz's Act I Bavarian hoedown with cooing neo-Nazi pigeons, "Der Guten Tag Hop-Clop," but there was the compensatory delight of Franz's lusty second-act tribute to Jimmy Durante, "Haben Sie Gehört Das Deutsche Band?"

V'ere sayin'

Haben sie gehört das deutsche band

Mit a zetz, mit a zap, mit a zing ….

We scholars in the field are ever alert to Mel Brooks' musical sources. Only recently Anthony Tommasini, the distinguished music critic of The New York Times , made the connection between the show's riotous klezmer number, "The King of Broadway," and Fiddler on the Roof. If it's Jewish, it must be Fiddler –right? Wrong! The influence here is actually Lionel Bart's Oliver! Mr. Brooks' sources–or musical valentines–are always in excellent taste, including his homages to Jule Styne, Kander and Ebb, and Richard Rodgers. But what of the Gershwins?

Thanks to Hershey Felder, I knew instinctively the inspiration for the second-act opening ballad, "That Face." The Gershwins wrote the most memorable film scores during their Hollywood phase. Think Fred Astaire ("They All Laughed," "A Foggy Day," "They Can't Take That Away From Me"). So "That Face" is Mr. Brooks' romantic Fred-and-Ginger number for Leopold Bloom and the lovely Swedish tease, Ulla Inga Hansen Bensen Yonsen Tallen-Hallen Svaden-Svanson.

And the rest of the second act? Not bad, not bad at all. Plus, it was free!

This has been the season, and possibly the century, of The Producers . As I go off for a summer break, let's put it this way about the show of shows, with special thanks to the Gershwins:

In time, the Rockies may crumble

Gibraltar may tumble

They're only made of clay

But our love is here to stay.

See you soon, everyone!

But I understate. For those of us who've seen Mr. Brooks' original 1968 film The Producers a million times and can recite more or less every hallowed line as purest poetry, the musical version is a great achievement. The torch has been passed from the iconic Bialystock and Bloom of Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder to the perfect partnership of Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick. The role of the deranged shyster Max Bialystock, the first producer ever to do summer stock in the winter, could have been made for the comic genius of Nathan Lane, and Mr. Lane has never been better. Leopold Bloom, the nebbishy, neurotic accountant with the comfort blankie cradled under his chin, is played with charmingly repressed terror by Matthew Broderick, and the understated Mr. Broderick is a triumph, a quiet riot to Mr. Lane's irresistible hysteria.

Scholars in the field will be pleased to note that the best of the original lines from the movie are hilariously in place. "We find the defendant incredibly guilty!" "That's it, baby, when you got it, flaunt it! Flaunt it!!" "I want … I want … I want … I want everything I've ever seen in the movies!" Or the stormtrouper's bouncy lyric from the "Springtime for Hitler" show stopper, "Don't be stupid / Be a smarty / Come and join the Nazi party!" That line, incidentally, is lip-synched in the show to the unmistakable voice of Mel Brooks, no less. It's a neat tribute to himself, which is only right.

His fingerprints are all over the place–in his love of showbiz and Busby Berkeley and great Broadway musicals, in his inexhaustible high energy and gleefully bad vaudevillian jokes. (The first joke of the evening involves a blind violinist.) Mr. Brooks is believed to be 75 years old going on 15.

True, subtlety isn't his forte.

I always had the biggest hits,

The biggest bathrooms at the Ritz,

My showgirls had the biggest tits!

I never was the pits in any way!

That's our Mel! But his score for the show is so right and catchy and, above all, such fun, we're happily swept along. There are musical homages to Gypsy, Oliver , Florenz Ziegfeld, Cole Porter, Jule Styne, Richard Rodgers and Gershwin. (Whoever said Mr. Brooks doesn't have good taste?) It's no coincidence that The Producers is set in 1959–the end of the golden age of musical comedy, from the supreme Guys and Dolls in 1950, to The Pajama Game in 1954, to the 1956 Bells Are Ringing that's currently revived on Broadway.

Our pleasure in the show is increased all the more by certain sublime references to other shows. There's one, for example, to 42nd Street , when the campy Roger DeBris takes over the role of Hitler at the last minute and his common-law assistant, Carmen Ghia, encourages him with the immortal words: "You're going out there a silly hysterical queen and you're coming back a great big passing-for-straight Broadway star!" Roger Bart is hissy Carmen and Gary Beach is the cross-dressing worst director in the world, Roger DeBris, and both are terrific.

In the scene to end all scenes, "Springtime for Hitler," Mr. Beach enters at the top of a lit staircase gaily playing the Führer, who's about to sing "Heil myself." But he first takes on a ludicrous pose that looks like an unhinged candelabra. This is because Mr. Beach played the candelabra in Beauty and the Beast . But you don't have to know that to appreciate the insane moment any more than it's essential to get the good Mr. Beach's reference to Judy Garland when Hitler coyly curls up on the edge of the stage mouthing to us the unspoken words: "I love you."

Then again, the work of the first-rate design team of Robin Wagner, William Ivey Long and Peter Kaczorowski couldn't be finer (or wittier). The inspired lunacy of "Little Old Lady Land" is a valentine to the fabled "Loveland" sequence in Follies . But the sight of Max Bialystock's devoted investors, the nymphomaniac little old ladies tap-dancing on their walkers, is something to behold–a historic first in its way, ending with their synchronized collapse like the Rockettes' Chocolate Soldiers. The nod to the famous mirror sequence in A Chorus Line during the "Springtime for Hitler" sequence is the sweeter for Mr. Wagner having designed A Chorus Line in the first place. But the fantastic staging and racing pulse of Ms. Stroman's choreography–"Come on, Germans–go into your dance!"–bring the audience to explosion point anyway.

As the breezy Mel Brooks lyric goes, "The thing you gotta know is / Ev'rything is showbiz." The Producers is Mr. Brooks' love letter to old Broadway (and a hilarious poison-pen letter to the man he calls Adolf Elizabeth Hitler). The plot of the show, of course, is one of the great comic inventions. Leo the nerdy accountant casually notes as he's going over Max's books, "You could raise a million dollars, put on a hundred-thousand-dollar failure, and keep the rest for yourself." In other beautiful words, you could actually make more money with a flop than a hit.

And so it came to pass that the newly formed partnership of Bialystock & Bloom produces a sure-fire disaster entitled Springtime for Hitler, A Gay Romp with Adolf and Eva at Berchtesgade , written by a neo-Nazi nutter, playwright and pigeon fancier in a German Army helmet named Franz Liebkind. It's "the mother lode." They'll be rich ! Except the anticipated bomb turns out to be a monster hit. Hence the title of Max's song, "Where Did We Go Right?"

The stage-struck Franz, played by Brad Oscar (a Forbidden Broadway alumnus) can deliver a Broadway belter with the best of them, like an Al Jolson crossed with Jimmy (Schnozzola) Durante. Even his lieblings , the neo-Nazi pigeons on the roof of his Jane Street apartment, dance and coo along to his Bavarian hoedown, "Der Guten Tag Hop-Clop."

Silliness is another Mel Brooks specialty, and we are glad. Note the posters in Max's office celebrating the titles of his Broadway shows: The Breaking Wind, When Cousins Marry and The Kidney Stone . His last fiasco was a musical version of Hamlet entitled Funny Boy .

The secret to this heady, utterly carefree production is its cast of terrific character actors–including, lest we forget, a super performance from Cady Huffman as the Swedish hotsy-totsy, "secretary-slash-receptionist" Ulla Inga Hansen Bensen Yonsen Tallen-Hallen Svaden-Svanson. "Your goodies you must push," sings the lovely Ulla. "Stick your chest out / Shake your tush …."

But the masterstroke is the brilliant adaptation of the original movie by Mr. Brooks and Thomas Meehan. Mr. Meehan (who wrote the book of Annie and collaborated on the screenplays of Mel Brooks' Spaceballs and To Be or Not To Be ) has helped to top what I imagined was writ in stone. The script is now a total riot. The opening of the show is merely a comic set-up while we settle down. ("Who produced this schlock?/ That slimy, sleazy Max Bialystock!") But the second number, "The King of Broadway," throws down a surprise ace and all but stops the show with its intoxicating klezmer music and hora in Schubert Alley performed by Broadway bums and dancing nuns carrying Playbill s from The Sound of Music . Leo's fantasy burlesque sequence, "I Wanna Be a Producer," is another stunner, its internal accountant's dirge to drudgery turning into an "Old Man River" lament. ("Oh, I debits all duh mornin'….") The audition scene has always been side-splitting. ("I would like to sing 'A Wandering Minstrel, I.'" "If you must ….") The show's hymn to Broadway theater, "Keep It Gay," has us all helpless again.

"Keep it light, keep it bright/ Keep it gay!" We can all agree with that, particularly when Mel Brooks is in control–or out of control. I've run out of space and superlatives. The Producers makes us kvell because it brings to such joyful life that great, lost tradition, the all-American show . A comedy tonight! A musical comedy forever! Perhaps without knowing it, or intending to, Mr. Brooks et al. have taken us magically back to the future.