“It’s never too late to change,” says Mike Ockrent. “We all have it within ourselves to alter the way we approach our fellow man.” Ockrent himself has certainly changed. Until the mid-Eighties, he was a thoughtful stager of Peter Nichols, Willy Russell, and the other stalwarts of British subsidized theater. Then his revival of Me and My Girl at Leicester Haymarket transferred to the West End and New York and suddenly, to Jimmy Nederlander and the other Broadway hit men, he was Mister Showbiz. Today, he’s the most successful musical-comedy director around, mainly because he’s the only musical-comedy director around, excepting George Abbott, who’s almost 108 and not as active as he once was. Me and My Girl is a harmless piece of Thirties jollity about a Cockney sparrer who inherits an earldom. Every now and then, I get Ockrent to explain to me how he approached the show as a Brechtian indictment of the British class system. Then I go see the thing and all I remember is the exchange between the butler and the new earl: “Apéritif, my lord?” “No, thanks, I’ve got me own”—the joke being (forgive me if this textual analysis is redundant) that the Cockney has assumed the butler is offering him a set of false teeth, a misunderstanding easily made as the Lambeth accent tends to substitute “f” for “th.” A couple of years later, Ockrent told me he saw Crazy for Youas a defense of public subsidy for the arts. When