TOM TITUS -- Theater

Remember the old TV commercial where the guy slaps the side of his

head and exclaims, “Gee, I coulda had a V8?”

That must have been the collective reaction of theater producers from

Times Square to Columbus Circle this week after the Tony nominations came

out. Only this time they were saying, “Gee, I coulda made a musical out

of an old Mel Brooks movie.”

“The Producers,” you see, earned 15 Tony nominations -- more than any

Broadway show in history. And, to put the green icing on the cake,

tickets to this musical revamping of the 30-year-old movie comedy have

escalated into three figures. It must have started more than one

entrepreneur doing the math and realizing how many other Brooksian flicks

are ripe for the adapting.

Originality is a dying art on Broadway these days. Revivals of such

past-proven hits as “Kiss Me Kate” do so well that the creative urge is

virtually stifled. So why not tap the gold mine of old movies the way the

New York theater did a quarter of a century ago -- turning “Some Like It

Hot” into the musical “Sugar,” or “All About Eve” into “Applause,” or

“The Apartment” into “Promises, Promises”?

With the gargantuan success of “The Producers” -- ironically, a comedy

about two scam artists who intentionally try to stage a flop and pocket

the investment money, but find themselves with a hit on their hands --

don’t you imagine Broadway’s real-life producers are thumbing through the

Mel Brooks canon even as we speak?

Take, for instance:

“Blazing Saddles.” The score for this spoof on the western genre --

summoning a black sheriff to bring law and order to a frontier town --

already is half-written. There’s the whip-cracking title song, sung by

Frankie Laine; the Marlene Dietrich spoof “I’m Tired,” originally sung by

the late Madeline Kahn; Cole Porter’s “I Get a Kick Out of You” by the

railroad workers; and the Count Basie classic “April in Paris,” done in

the movie by Basie himself with full orchestra in the middle of the

wilderness.

“Young Frankenstein.” Two numbers already are in place -- “Ah, Sweet

Mystery of Life,” played on the violin to summon the monster, and

“Puttin’ on the Ritz,” the wacky duet done on film by Gene Wilder and a

semi-articulate Peter Boyle as his creation.

“High Anxiety.” Brooks wrote a title song and sung it himself as an

impromptu lounge entertainment to bolster this hilarious spoof on Alfred

Hitchcock movies. If only Harvey Korman and Cloris Leachman could be

talked into reprising their movie roles, even this late in their careers.

“Robin Hood: Men in Tights.” Between this so-so movie comedy and

Brooks’ Sherwood Forest-set TV series, “When Things Were Rotten,” the

possibilities are endless.

“Spaceballs.” With the new “Star Wars” movie coming out soon, Brooks’

takeoff on the space genre could go where no musical has gone before, and

be topical at the same time.

“History of the World, Part I.” Probably the funniest, and most

underrated, entry in the Brooks stable, it satirizes ancient Rome, the

Spanish Inquisition and the French Revolution. The bouncy torture number,

“The Inquisition,” topped off by nuns doing an Esther Williams-type

swimming routine, might be a little hard to translate to the stage.

One can only hope that Brooks, now well into his 70s, has the time and

energy to turn out musical scores for each, as he did for “The

Producers.” His legions of fans await with bated breath.

o7 The Tony Awards will be broadcast June 3 on CBS.

f7 * TOM TITUS writes about and reviews local theater for the Daily

Pilot. His stories appear Thursdays and Saturdays.