Terry Teachout, who covers theater for The Wall Street Journal, offers the opinion that the drop in audience attendance for The Producers represents the end of an era. Here's the whole article and here's a key excerpt…
What struck me about "The Producers" when I first saw it was how unabashedly old-fashioned it seemed, from the right-between-the-eyes overture to the Milton-Berlesque acting. It stands to reason that the show should be old-fashioned, its creator having been born in 1926, but it occurred to me that what I was witnessing was not so much a new musical as the last gasp of a dying comic language. Strip away the naughty words and self-consciously outré production numbers and "The Producers" is nothing more (or less) than a virtuoso reminiscence of the lapel-grabbing, kill-for-a-laugh shtickery on which so much of the stand-up comedy of my youth was based.
I disagree with most of the above. Some of the trappings of Jewish humor such as the accents and Yiddish asides may be dying out due to the passage of time. (Mel Brooks once predicted that some day, people would listen to his "2000 Year Old Man" albums just to hear a dialect that no longer existed.) But look at Comedy Central and what the up-and-coming stand-ups are doing and you'll hear endless dick and ass jokes. The fart jokes that once seemed like "kill-for-a-laugh shtickery" in Blazing Saddles are now showing up on NBC primetime. Comedy is getting no classier; it's just losing its accent.
I'm not knocking the change, understand; just pointing out that most popular comedy has always involved grabbing the audience by the lapels and killing for the laugh. The number one comedy film in the country at the moment is Scary Movie 3 and the number one comedy star is probably Adam Sandler. I see them as a natural evolution from Young Frankenstein and Jerry Lewis, not necessarily better but certainly, apart from the new gentility, working out of the same tool chest.
I think what happened with The Producers was that about three years' worth of audiences all wanted to go the first year so they could see Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick. A certain percentage of theatergoing is built around the "event" nature of a show, and it's a bigger event with the bigger names. If you had a Broadway Time Machine, you'd want to go back and see Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady or Robert Preston in The Music Man, not the guys who followed them. That would in no way reflect on the content of the shows. Teachout notes that The Producers has only been playing at 69% capacity lately. Yes, but there are two big and obvious reasons, one being that Lewis J. Stadlen, who has been highly acclaimed in the role of Max Bialystock, left the show a few weeks back with a sudden hip injury. So recently, true unknowns and understudies have been carrying the proceedings, which will hurt any box office at any production. Secondly, it's been known for months that Lane and Broderick were probably returning. If you wanted to see a given Broadway show, would you go see unknown quantities in the leads or wait until you could maybe get in to see the original, well-reviewed stars?
Teachout predicts that the show won't last much longer than the second departure of Nathan and Matthew. I think it will depend wholly on who steps into those roles. Rumor has it that Jason Alexander and Martin Short, currently in the L.A. company, are unavailable for New York. But if they were, or if comparable names could be secured, I bet the show could keep running the way David Merrick kept Hello, Dolly open for several centuries, casting a succession of legendary performers. It's not that the style of comedy is outdated. It's that if people are going to pay $100 a seat, as they do for The Producers, they want the best they can get for their money, and think that means Big Stars.
By the way, I should mention that any day now, Teachout will probably have a chance to express the above opinion again. Jackie Mason is about to open a new musical in New York. For the last decade or so, Mason has been repackaging a very tired stand-up act and booking it into Broadway houses and regional theaters with steadily-decreasing returns. Throughout his career, every single thing he's touched — TV shows, films, other plays, everything except his pure stand-up — has been a spectacular flop. This new show is supposed to offer "cutting edge" and hip comedy complete with risqué jokes and nudity…just what the world wants from a former rabbi. If it goes the way of most of his projects, we'll probably hear that it represents the death of "Borscht Belt, in-your-face" humor. But it won't. It'll just represent another Jackie Mason failure.