Mel and me.

A couple of years ago, when I had an office on the Culver Studios lot, my meetings with producers, department heads, and actors for the series City of Angels would be underscored by mad piano playing and robust singing from the man above me.

That man was Mel Brooks, and he was writing a musical.

Now the score that the exuberant Brooks was belting out above me has become The Producers, the Tony-lauded toast of Broadway. And I, for one, don't get it.

I should mention that your favorite African-American Advocate columnist (by default) has written a few musicals. Sixteen to be exact, including an adaptation of Richard Wright's short story "Almos' a Man," produced by Soho Rep in 1985, and a workshop of a musical about my days in advertising called On Hold With Music that starred Jason Alexander in 1983. Back in my high school and college days, I even adapted Machiavelli's The Prince and The Catcher in the Rye (which of course we never got the rights to). In other words, I like a good musical as much as the next theater queen.

But The Producers is not a good musical.

It's not a bad musical: It's funny (sometimes), well-produced, and extraordinarily well-performed by Matthew Broderick, Nathan Lane, Cady Huffman, Gary Beach, and my personal favorite, Brad Oscar as Franz Liebkind (who tickled me to no end with his solo number "Haben Sie Gehort das Deutsche Band?").

Two things keep me from joining those who think of this show as the Second Coming of the Musical. I wasn't nearly as amused as my fellow columnist (and Funniest Guy in the Known World) Bruce Vilanch was by what he terms the "most outrageous and hilarious parade of gay fixtures" he's seen. Bruce reported in these pages that these over-the-top caricatures--a diesel dyke lighting designer and drag queen director among my least favorites--had "the mixed gay and straight audience scream[ing] with delight."

I chuckled from time to time, but "delight" eluded me. Maybe I'm too serious about my theater, too indoctrinated by my pals at the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, but I couldn't help feeling we were being laughed at, made the butt of jokes by a straight laughmeister who knows that we are the final frontier when even jabs at Hitler aren't enough to proudly wear a badge of political incorrectness.

I also thought the score sounded better through my ceiling.

But the whole experience accelerated my return to the theater. It helped to see Rent again and to enjoy a real Broadway show like The Full Monty, which boasts actual original music, clever lyrics, and a love song between two men that climaxes the evening. And to savor the return of Lily Tomlin's one-woman show, as amazing an evening in the theater as I've had in a long time. These shows reminded me that theater can do more than divert--it can transport you, move you, teach you.

With that in mind, I've also returned to creating musical theater, a venture now in rehearsals called Letters From 'Nam, based on the collection of letters titled Dear America: Letters Home From Vietnam. Virtually everything that's said on the stage comes from letters soldiers wrote during the war, with a stunningly attractive cast of six young men (and Maureen McGovern as the mother of one of them), battling their way through a year in 'Nam. Some live, some die, but all are changed by what they see and do, as their actual letters poignantly reveal.

Why do a Vietnam musical? It's certainly unlikely to challenge Mel's magnum opus for box-office success and widespread acclaim. But what this child of the theater has learned over the years is that reaching the heart, illuminating the human condition, or just plain taking us somewhere emotionally that we've never been is a more worthwhile goal than box-office success. For all the banging away upstairs that eventually became Mel's Broadway gold mine, I still left The Producers empty and unsatisfied. I want Letters From 'Nam to offer something more. I believe the thinking audience deserves that.

Letters From 'Nam will be presented September 4-23 at the North Shore Music Theatre in Beverly, Mass.