By BEN BRANTLEY Published: November 9, 2007 We may as well start with the obvious questions about “Young Frankenstein,” the really big show from Mel Brooks that opened last night at the Hilton Theater. The answer to all of them is no.
No, it is not nearly as good as “The Producers,” Mr. Brooks’s previous Broadway musical. No, it is not as much fun as the 1974 Mel Brooks movie, also called “Young Frankenstein,” on which it is based. No, it does not provide $450 worth of pleasure (that being its record-setting price for “premier seating”).
Well, unless you measure your pleasure in decibels. Even by the blaring standards of Broadway, “Young Frankenstein,” directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman, stands out for its loudness — in its ear-splitting amplification, eye-splitting visual effects and would-be side-splitting jokes. It’s as if the production had been built on the premise that its audiences would be slow on the uptake and hard of hearing, the sort of folks who would say: “That pun flew right by me. Could you repeat it a couple of times, louder?”
There’s no denying that this hopped-up stage version of Mr. Brooks’s movie, about a brilliant American doctor who finds his heart (among other body parts) in Transylvania, looks like it cost every penny of its reported $16 million-plus budget. Much of Robin Wagner’s comic-book gothic set could fit right into that gold standard of family-friendly scariness, the Haunted Mansion at Disney World.
Still, as newly rich New Yorkers learn every day, money can’t buy you flair. It can’t even buy you laughs. “Young Frankenstein” — which features songs by Mr. Brooks and a book by Mr. Brooks and Thomas Meehan, his collaborator on “The Producers” — certainly has a high density of talent. It also surely has the hardest-working supersize ensemble, led by an amiable but overwhelmed Roger Bart, and the largest percentage of gags per scene.
Some of those gags, many of which are lifted from the movie, are pretty funny. (O.K., let’s be honest: I laughed exactly three times.) There are some enjoyable musical routines. (All right, my count is 2 out of nearly 20.) And if the headline stars, Mr. Bart (in the title role) and Megan Mullally (as his Park Avenue fiancée), don’t feel naturally wedded to their roles, the production does offer confirmation of the distinctive, very different talents of Sutton Foster, Shuler Hensley and Andrea Martin.
The show takes many of the elements that made “The Producers” such a delight and then saps them of their joy by overselling them. The problem is partly the source material. “The Producers” was originally a 1968 movie about putting on a musical. In translating it to the stage, Mr. Brooks, Mr. Meehan and Ms. Stroman filled it with both an insider’s sardonic knowingness and a fan’s affection. Amid the show’s sea of clever industry caricatures were two real characters: the producers themselves, Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom, embodied as an exhilarating double act by Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick.
The film of “Young Frankenstein,” which Pauline Kael called Mr. Brooks’s “most sustained piece of moviemaking,” was a different kettle of celluloid, a genre pastiche of Depression-era American monster movies. Mr. Brooks scrupulously honored the style of those films, even to the point of shooting it in black-and-white, and then tossed in a stink bomb of Catskills humor.
It’s not impossible to simulate dark vintage movies onstage. (The Broadway-bound British recreation of Hitch****’s “39 Steps” is proof of that.) But it’s a lot harder if your first objective is to be bawdy, bouncy and colorful. Despite its fidelity to the film’s script, “The New Mel Brooks Musical Young Frankenstein” (to use its sprawling official title) feels less like a sustained book musical than an overblown burlesque revue, right down to its giggly smuttiness.
Ms. Stroman seems to take the show one joke at a time: land this gag, milk it for as long as possible and then mark time with some standard-issue ensemble dancing until you move on to the next . As with “Spamalot,” another (and much better) movie-inspired musical, you can sense people in the audience anticipating their favorite jokes from the film and roaring even before the punch lines. Similarly, the performances operate on a gag-by-gag basis. This vaudeville sensibility may account for the disconnectedness of Mr. Bart’s Frederick Frankenstein. (It may also come from Mr. Bart’s reportedly having injured his back during previews.) But as the New York doctor who in 1934 visits Transylvania to settle his grandfather’s estate and winds up moving in to make monsters, Mr. Bart sort of disappears.
He can sing, he can dance, he can sell a funny line in several different styles. In a filigree supporting role, like the serpentine Carmen Ghia in “The Producers,” he can be a knockout. But here he doesn’t create a continuous character. (I felt the same way when I saw him as Leo in “The Producers.”) And he lacks that wild-eyed glint of ambition run amok that every mad scientist needs.
As Elizabeth, Victor’s high-strung fiancée, Ms. Mullally (late of the sitcom “Will & Grace”) is obviously doing her best to banish memories of the brilliant Madeline Kahn, who created the part on screen. Looking more like a matron than a madcap heiress in William Ivey Long’s swanky costumes, Ms. Mullally instead imitates several 1930s movie actresses (Mary Boland, Irene Dunne, Shirley Temple, even Margaret Dumont), without settling on any one. And though Christopher Fitzgerald is a gifted singing comic, it seems odd to cast a cherub in the role of the demented Igor.
On the plus side (the slimmer side), Sutton Foster (of “Thoroughly Modern Millie” and “The Drowsy Chaperone”) is delicious as Dr. Frankenstein’s voluptuous young assistant, who uses yodeling as foreplay. (The deadpan friskiness of her “Roll in the Hay” is a high point.) Andrea Martin, an inspired comedian, makes the role of Frau Blucher, the sinister housekeeper, all her own through artful exaggeration. And Shuler Hensley (Judd in the most recent Broadway revival of “Oklahoma!”) is terrific, turning Frankenstein’s monster into the most human character onstage.
If I haven’t said much about the musical numbers, it’s because they mostly blend together. Mr. Brooks’s songs have a throwaway quality, as if they were dashed off on the day of the performance, and mostly they lack the witty affection for period styles of “The Producers.” Ms. Stroman, too, often seems on automatic pilot as a choreographer.
There is one truly exhilarating number, though you have to sit through most of the show before it arrives. It comes when Dr. Frankenstein introduces his show-business-trained creature to the world by having him perform Irving Berlin’s “Puttin’ On the Ritz.” Ms. Stroman pulls out all the stops (and most of the usual contents of her bag of dance tricks) for this one, evoking a catalog of top-hat styles. But what really makes it fly is Mr. Hensley’s evocation of the monster’s pleasure in what he’s doing. This big galoot of a mannequin is being seduced by the singular joys of musical comedy and loving it. For the first and only time in the show, so are we.
This jolt of feeling isn’t enough to erase the impression that from its opening number, “Young Frankenstein” has never stopped screeching at you. This means that: (a) it has soon worn out its voice, and (b) it leaves you with a monster-size headache.
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Posts: 12939 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
That just did a lot of damage to its Tony chances. There was already a lot of suspicion in the NY Theater community about this one b/c of the outrageous top ticket price and the unorthodox non-reporting of weekly grosses.
The Times doesn't have the power to kill a show the way it once did, but the importance of a good review from Brantley can't be understated either. This is bad news for Brooks & Co.
Posts: 2076 | Location: New York, New York | Registered: August 08, 2003
Originally posted by R2684: That just did a lot of damage to its Tony chances. There was already a lot of suspicion in the NY Theater community about this one b/c of the outrageous top ticket price and the unorthodox non-reporting of weekly grosses.
The Times doesn't have the power to kill a show the way it once did, but the importance of a good review from Brantley can't be understated either. This is bad news for Brooks & Co.
Does this mean best musical winner... XANADU???!!!???
Posts: 12939 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
A *** review from Clive Barnes in the NEW YORK POST...
November 9, 2007 -- WHERE did we go almost right? - as Max and Leo (almost) used to sing in "The Producers." The new Mel Brooks/Susan Stroman musi cal extravaganza "Young Frank enstein" is nearly very good indeed - but it is not the "The Producers."
It has the same bloodlines - a Mel Brooks musicalization of a classic Mel Brooks movie staged by Susan Stroman - hence the hype, not to mention the expectation of premium ticket prices.
It also has a great comic lead in Roger Bart as that virginal Dr. Fronkensteen being transported to the dark side of the moon.
But this story - a dazzlingly affectionate spoof of all the Boris Karloff movies that ever karloffed - does not lend itself to stage adaptation in the way of the earlier movie.
There is no Hitler to have a Springtime, and, as a cult movie, "Young Frankenstein" owed a terrific amount to the personas and performances of the entire movie cast, particularly the goggle-eyed, ****ney Marty Feldman as Igor the hunchback and Gene Wilder as the eponymous hero, Frederick Frankenstein.
When you trade on a legend, you have to match up. "Young Frankenstein" does not - quite.
Now for the good news.
In telling this tale of a young scientist who sets sail for Europe on the H.M.S. Queen Murray to reluctantly join the family business of making Monsters in darkest Eastern Europe, Brooks and Stroman pull out every stop.
Despite music that's more ho-hum than hummable, Brooks's lyrics are bright and witty.
Better yet, the book - maintaining virtually all of those iconic quotable quotes - does a great job, with the assistance of co-writer Thomas Meehan, in transferring the original script to the stage.
An even greater job is done by Stroman whose staging, choreography and supervising of special effects manage to suggest the Broadway musical at its dizziest, glitziest and funniest. In her entire career, Stroman has done nothing better - she even outproduces her work on "The Producers."
Posts: 12939 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
If there's fun to be found in Young Frankenstein (* * ½ out of four), Mel Brooks' latest movie-to-Broadway-musical transformation, it's all the result of the giddy, goodwill-laden charms of the original. What worked on film works, for the most part, on stage. It's when the show gets inventive, expansive and, well, musical that it gets into trouble.
The core problem is not Frankenstein's monster but The Producers' ghost. Once again, as on that record-setting hit, Brooks has written the music and lyrics and teamed with Thomas Meehan for the book, and Susan Stroman has returned as director and choreographer. But Young Frankenstein was a smaller, tighter, more cinematic comedy than The Producers, one in which the characters were mere conduits for gentle jabs at old horror films. Even if the extraneous vaudeville shtick the creators have imposed on it were of Producers quality, and it isn't, Young Frankenstein probably would crumble under the weight.
As before, the story follows the last of the Frankensteins (Roger Bart) as he heads to Transylvania, leaving his fiancé (Megan Mullally) behind. Soon he's making a monster (Shuler Hensley), eagerly aided by the show's greatest delights: Christopher Fitzgerald's Igor, Sutton Foster's Inga and, best of all, Andrea Martin's Frau Blucher.
All the big scenes you remember are musicalized: Inga sings about rolling in the hay, Frau Blucher winningly trills He Vas My Boyfriend. But too many songs are dull, too many seem randomly inserted, and almost all either send the story wandering off in pointless new directions or extend old bits that were funnier shorter. The songwriting skill Brooks showed in The Producers is absent here, and the witty inventiveness Stroman brought to Crazy For You has turned into endless repetitions of Roger DeBris' "turn, turn, kick, turn."
Struggling to hold his own against the more colorful secondary characters, Bart sends his voice screeching up to a register that, when overamplified, threatens to scratch glass. Luckily, Foster, Fitzgerald and Martin compensate — with Martin's hilariously varied response to those whinnying horses almost worth the price of admission on its own. Hensley makes Puttin' on the Ritz the show-stopper it should be (though it does go on too long), but Mullally is a mixed treat, using her comic skills and huge voice to great effect in some scenes while crossing over to crass and harsh in others.
For some fans, the mere chance to watch those stars re-create the film's high points may be enough, but you can't help feeling that underneath all the bloat is a more modest and likeable musical comedy. Modest shows, however, seldom become the kind of big hits that command big ticket prices, and big is clearly the goal here.
No, Brooks and company didn't create that monster. They just made Young Frankenstein its victim.
Posts: 12939 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
Originally posted by R2684: That just did a lot of damage to its Tony chances. There was already a lot of suspicion in the NY Theater community about this one b/c of the outrageous top ticket price and the unorthodox non-reporting of weekly grosses.
The Times doesn't have the power to kill a show the way it once did, but the importance of a good review from Brantley can't be understated either. This is bad news for Brooks & Co.
Does this mean best musical winner... XANADU???!!!???
It's possible with the word on "Little Mermaid" not very encouraging either. But we've still got "Passing Strange" and "In the Heights" ahead...
Posts: 2076 | Location: New York, New York | Registered: August 08, 2003
"In the Heights" reputation Off-Broadway (provided the stagehand strike actually lets it open) is probably the safest bet for Best Musical right now, unless "The Little Mermaid" defies the lukewarm notices and manages to really blow the voters out of the water (no pun intended).
In my opinion, I don't feel Mullally should even get a nomination. If she does, it'll be because of who she is. And should she be nominated, she should definitely be in the Featured category. She's only in 1 scene in Act 1!
Now as for the other 2 main females... Sutton Foster should go Lead (though she won't win imo), and Andrea Martin will for sure be nominated in Featured. The show has 1 for sure win in Martin. She was simply outstanding.
I don't remember the actor playing Igor, but he should be nominated in Featured and also win.
I also see a win for set design and maybe directing.
Best show? In all honesty, I liked "Xanadu" better.
~Morgan
FYC Oscars 09 - The Visitor: Lead Actor (Richard Jenkins), Supporting Actor (Haaz Sleiman), Supporting Actress (Hiam Abbass) and Original Screenplay (Tom McCarthy) - Then She Found Me: Lead Actress (Helen Hunt)
Daytime Emmy Congrats Writing Team OLTL! Directing Team OLTL! Kristoff St John! Boo to every other single winner.
Posts: 2321 | Location: Arkansas State Univ Department of Theatre most of the time. | Registered: December 31, 2004
Both Sutton and Megan are billed above the title, correct? So that means that unless the Administration Committee decides to move them, they'll be considered leads.
I suspect Mullaly will be moved to featured. Probably Bart and Foster will be the only leads.
Posts: 2076 | Location: New York, New York | Registered: August 08, 2003
Below is a Times article investigating the dramatic reduction in ticket prices to Young Frankenstein (formerly a top price of $450-350, now $120). It seems sales for the show have been slowing dramatically lately.
Commercial success has traditionally had very little to do with what gets nominated for a Tony, but in the case of "Young Frankenstein" I think robust business would've made it a bit harder to ignore (think "Poppins" last year). With its bad reviews and bad blood among industry producers who scoffed at their initial top ticket price and refusal to report weekly grosses, this may spell trouble for the new Mel Brooks musical's prospects.
I admit - I haven't seen the musical, because I am not a big musical fan, but from what I can read here it seems like a classical transmedia case - The original media is alway better than the copycat. I have never seen a movie as good as the book or a play as good as the movie... this seems to be no exception.
Of course it's irrelevant to compare different types of media, but...
I'd say that the film version of "The Lion in Winter" is far superior to any production I've ever seen of the play. Which probably has a lot to do with the talent involved in the film. Even so, as a play, "Lion" is sort of not that accomplished. Sort of reads like a Shakespeare knock off. But as a film, it's riveting.
"Amadeus" is obviously a great play, but I've found the film a more satisfying experience, honestly.
"Cabaret" was obviously changed in big ways for the film version, but it's one of the truly great American films...
I'd say that the only novels that are ever better served by the film are the sort of mass-market paperback types, a la Denis Lehane, that crowd etc. Literary adaptations never live up.
Granted these are just a few examples as compared to the hundreds of plays and books that have been massacred by Hollywood. The reverse of which "Young Frankenstein" has recently jointed.
Posts: 2076 | Location: New York, New York | Registered: August 08, 2003
Originally posted by Tanya21: I admit - I haven't seen the musical, because I am not a big musical fan, but from what I can read here it seems like a classical transmedia case - The original media is alway better than the copycat. I have never seen a movie as good as the book or a play as good as the movie... this seems to be no exception.
I think most would agree the film versions of "The Godfather", "Jaws" and "The Silence of the Lambs" are all better than the rather trashy but entertaining books they are based on. "L.A. Confidential" is much better than the almost incomprehensible book, and I am USUALLY a James Ellroy fan, it is based on.
Posts: 12939 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
Originally posted by Tanya21: I admit - I haven't seen the musical, because I am not a big musical fan, but from what I can read here it seems like a classical transmedia case - The original media is alway better than the copycat. I have never seen a movie as good as the book or a play as good as the movie... this seems to be no exception.
I think most would agree the film versions of "The Godfather", "Jaws" and "The Silence of the Lambs" are all better than the rather trashy but entertaining books they are based on. "L.A. Confidential" is much better than the almost incomprehensible book, and I am USUALLY a James Ellroy fan, it is based on.
A few more better film adaptations come to mind...
"Out of Sight" is probably the best Elmore Leonard film adaptation even though it's based on one of his weaker books.
I cannot vouch for the book as I haven't read it but critics and Ernest Hemingway himself considered TO HAVE AND TO HAVE NOT his worst book but it was made into the classic Humphrey Bogart film.
And while we're speaking of Humphrey Bogart, "Casablanca" is one of the best films ever made but nobody puts on productions of the play "Everyone Comes to Rick's" which it is based on. I would wager the film "Casablanca" is much better than the play.
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Posts: 12939 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
