Richard Kind on Returning to Max Bialystok in ‘Producers’ Revival

Richard Kind is back in the fraudulent theatrical agency business.

Twenty-two years after playing Max Bialystok on Broadway following Nathan Lane in the role, the veteran actor has brought the character to the West End for the first time, starring in the revival of Mel Brooks‘ “The Producers” at London’s Garrick Theatre, where the production is running for a strictly limited seven-week engagement.

The timing almost didn’t work. Kind tells Variety the spring television cycle back in the U.S. made the schedule difficult, and he initially turned the job down. It was the show’s producer – David Babani, the founder of the Menier Chocolate Factory, where the production was originally staged – who intervened directly. “He gave me a call and said, we will work with you on whatever you want,” Kind says. The accommodations were substantial: he rehearsed for two weeks in London, returned to the U.S. for roughly 11 days of television commitments, then came back for two days before going on.

The Garrick’s 732-seat house is a markedly different proposition from the 1,400-seat Broadway venue where Kind first inhabited the role – and from the 180-seat Menier Chocolate Factory where this production was originally developed. “This character is talking differently, even though he’s saying the same words and his emotions are the same,” he says. “It’s a different feel.” At the Garrick, he says, the front row is close enough that there is no room for a pit orchestra. “I’m right on top of the audience. You adapt.”

On what makes Max work as a character, Kind is straightforward. “He’s a heinous man who is loved,” he says. He describes a chance meeting at a physiotherapy clinic with Simon Lipkin, the actor currently playing Fagin in a production of “Oliver!” and says the encounter reinforced something about the appeal of lovable villains. “We are both heinous criminals stealing from other people, and the audience loves us.”

The production arrives as Brooks approaches his 100th birthday, which Kind takes as an occasion to reflect on the particular latitude the comedian is afforded. Certain jokes that would be off-limits coming from a younger performer land differently when the context is Brooks’ established tradition of bad taste. “I think it’s all context right now,” Kind says. On whether “The Producers” – with its Hitler musical-within-a-musical – has specific resonance at this political moment, he is more circumspect, arguing that the show’s world is firmly rooted in the mid-20th-century Broadway milieu in which it was written. “I see contradictions,” he says of the comparison, “where they intersect and go one way and another, and they’re not parallel at all.”

Kind has built one of American television’s most recognizable careers – from “Mad About You” and “Spin City” through to his current recurring role in “Only Murders in the Building,” where he has worked alongside Steve Martin and Martin Short. He also appeared recently in Netflix’s live talk show “John Mulaney Presents: Everybody’s in LA.” He was last seen on the London stage in “Guys & Dolls” at the Phoenix Theatre. But he says the stage remains a non-negotiable part of his working year. “I think it’s important to do a play a year,” he says. “You get to live an entire life over an evening – there is an arc that you have to maintain and an energy and a calibration that film does not have.”

This year he is doing two. After “The Producers” wraps, Kind will take on the role of Edna Turnblad in a production of “Hairspray” – an engagement that will include a run at a 15,000-seat venue in St. Louis, a setting that will require a very different kind of calibration from the Garrick’s intimate stalls.

As for what he hopes current audiences carry out of “The Producers,” Kind keeps it grounded. “If they were entertained, then in a world that absolutely sucks, maybe they spent two and a half hours that was delightful,” he says. “That’s what I hope. It’s my job to entertain you. It’s not my job to teach you anything.”