FLAUNT IT, BABY! This morning comes word from Mark Evanier that British actor Henry (Who???) Goodman will shortly replace Nathan Lane in the Broadway production of The Producers. Mark -- who's seen darn near everyone in everything -- remarks that "Having never seen Mr. Goodman in anything, I have no idea how he'll be except, of course, you have to figure the producers of The Producers looked long and hard, and had their pick of darn near everyone."

UPDATE: Steve Malzberg's local talk-radio show on WABC floats the rumor that the Steven ("Wings") Weber is in line for the Leo Bloom role. (I dunno -- shouldn't the minimum qualification for Bloom be the appearance of youth and innocence incarnate? Weber's getting to be a tad creepy-looking at 40+.) The new cast will take over in mid-April.

A snarky aside: I'm just waiting for it to dawn on Maureen Dowd that there's grist for a whole 750-word column to be had, by drawing comparisons between The Producers and the Enron saga. "Do you realize," the Leo Bloom character would say in an unguarded moment of creative accounting theorizing, "that under the right conditions, you could make more money bankrupting a company than if you produced something of value!" (Or is that just so obvious that even Ms. Dowd can resist the temptation?)