Hello from below the Freberg plug, and I'd like to congratulate my pal Brad Oscar for stepping up from playing Franz Liebkind and understudying Max Bialystock to full-time Bialystock status. Brad first got involved with the show when he was hired as an understudy/swing. Even before the show hit Broadway, he'd been upgraded to Nazi Playwright and, when Nathan Lane began having vocal problems,
he began playing Max…to rave reaction.
With the departure of Lane, some hoped Brad would get the job full-time but it went instead to British actor Henry Goodman. Last Sunday, after completing the matinee, Mr. Goodman received a call from his London-based agent, basically telling him to clean out his dressing room. Though he has a contract that will pay him $15,000 a week for the remainder of his 9-month contract, the producers of The Producers are opting to pay him off and put Brad back in the lead. There's a moral there about not being impatient…just doing good work and waiting for your reward. (It doesn't always work that way but it should.)
The sad part, of course, is the unceremonious ouster of Henry Goodman. I have no inside info on this — just press reports that the producers felt he was departing too much from the Lane model and insisting on remaking the character. "Too brooding and serious," someone called it. Perhaps. But you have to wonder, given the gracelessness of the firing. Ordinarily, it would have been done on a more gentlemanly basis: Word would be released that Goodman was ill or exhausted or dealing with personal matters. Brad would have taken over, ostensibly for a week or two…and Goodman would simply not have come back. It wouldn't have been quite as juicy a news item that way; wouldn't have alerted a ticket-buying public that the mighty juggernaut called The Producers is mortal and that a few seats are going unsold. Even leaving aside compassion for Mr. Goodman, you'd think there was a better way to make the switch.
So why'd they do it the way they did it? Beats me.
