Star rating: *****

With a big, blowzy, world-famous show like The Producers, it's hard to come with no expectations. The story is simple: failed theatre impresario Max Bialystock wants a hit, and when accountant Leo Bloom comes along and suggests that a stinker on stage, rather than a success, would make the duo big bucks, a plan is hatched to make a Broadway bomb.

Originally a Mel Brooks film, the stage play is a real cracker. Like many long-running Broadway hits, this show falls into a comfortable rhythm of snappy dialogue, air-tight delivery, clean, exciting choreography and sharp, toe-tapping orchestrations, but with one big difference - the show is bursting with a fresh, sassy energy and it never dips down, not even for a moment.

Leads Cory English and Joe Pasquale (Bialystock and Bloom, respectively) take the script and blow the hell out of it with their double-act of schmaltz and nebbish, and they couldn't be a better combination. Pasquale's famously needling voice works remarkable well as he wheedles and warbles his way through Bloom's showbiz predicament. English bears his oily little soul with his closing solo number, Betrayed, and is so charmingly crooked throughout the show that the impulse is to throttle then coddle him as he schemes and connives his way to big bucks.

The real show-stopper of the night was local boy Allan Stewart's bring-the-house-down performance in Springtime for Hitler, a perfectly rousing complement to his camp coquetry as show director Roger Debris. The chorus and big-bill choreography enchant and thrill at every appearance. It's funny, it's bizarre, it's a riotous good time. Go, go before it's gone.