When the two con men in Mel Brooks’s classic film comedy The Producers decide to mount a sure-fire flop on Broadway, they hit on a musical comedy called Springtime for Hitler — a nostalgic romp through the life and loves of the Fuhrer guaranteed to outrage and disgust the New York theater crowd. Real-life producers Alexander Cohen and Max Cooper might have brooded a bit about the possibility that the British play they brought to Broadway in October would prove to be Springtime for Hitler 1996 — only without the inadvertent success Springtime for Hitler enjoys in The Producers. For Ronald Harwood’s Taking Sides is a sympathetic account of what happened when the German conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler found himself accused of being a Nazi after World War II.
