The New Mel Brooks Musical Young Frankenstein

The New Mel Brooks Musical Young Frankenstein is a very solid musical—and the "solidity" is its weakness as well as its strength. The production values are high, the music well-written, the performances professional. Most audience members should be satisfied, especially if they can take advantage of discounted tickets from sources such as Playbill.com.

But when it comes to the laff factor—the musical's ability to live up to the high low comedy standard established by the original movie—that's where the show falls as short as its title is long. When I saw it on June 15 (when many of the original leads were in it, with Jon Patrick Walker doing good understudy work as Frederick Frankenstein), I left with a greater appreciation of the cartoonishness of the movie characters. In the film, Gene Wilder swung wildly between meekness and madness, Teri Garr was a deceptively ditzy sexpot, Madeline Kahn was a prissy prude, Marty Feldman was a pop-eyed Igor, Cloris Leachman a brilliantly brittle Blücher, Kenneth Mars a mechanical marvel, and so on and so forth. In contrast, the Broadway characters came across as bland, not as kooky.

Musical Maven Myra has noted that at least two songs could easily be cut from the show's 160 minute running time. She seems right about that—though it's possible that the "extra" songs give the company time to change scenes. What I don't understand is why the silliness that worked so well in the movie seemed to be lost in the transition to the stage. I'm sure that the production remains very solid—"the best that money can buy"—but I hope that the producers try to juice the show by encouraging the actors to make their characters more comical.

Just look at how goofy the comedy can be in this trailer—not at first, but eventually. It's enhanced by the camera work, which gives audiences a more intimate perspective than the stage (especially in the doleful glances Peter Boyle gives the camera), but there's still got to be a way to raise the comic quotient in the theater.



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TONY NOMINEES 2008

From what I could tell from NY1, it seems that the Tony nominees were posted online before they were announced live, in a very subdued, almost grim, fashion, by David Hyde Pierce and Sara Ramirez. (They were at the Lincoln Center Library for Performing Arts, so maybe scads of scary librarians were shooshing them the whole time.)

Perhaps because I've yet to see a bunch of productions (and I missed the opportunity to see a bunch of others), I'm most excited that Stephen Sondheim will be the recipient of the Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre. He's had at least a hand in creating such shows as Gypsy, Follies, Sweeney Todd, West Side Story, and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum—and revivals of his work remain Broadway staples to this day, with Gypsy and Sunday in the Park with George running and West Side Story on the way.

Sunday... is one of the big nominees of this season; garnering even more nominations than Sunday (9) are In the Heights (the leader at 13) and South Pacific (11)...oops, I mean Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific. I believe that August: Osage County is the top-nominated play, with strong showings from Macbeth (by William Shakespeare, another staple of Broadway programming), Boeing, Boeing, and The 39 Steps.

As you might imagine based on my recent coverage, I'm sorry that Alli Mauzey of Cry-Baby didn't score a nomination. Also among the missing: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Not nominated for Best Musical: Young Frankenstein. Oops, I mean The New Mel Brooks Musical Young Frankenstein. Grease managed to score one nomination, for Best Musical Revival.

Here's a newly posted video of yet another side of Mauzey: in character as Galinda/Glinda in Wicked.



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FRANKENSTEIN IS IN

You got your Young Frankenstein musical...with Sutton Foster. You got your Frankenstein musical...with Hunter Foster. And, of course, you got your powerful metaphor for artifice taking on a life of its own...and misbehaving!

So here's a DVD triple feature:

Frankenstein
Bride of Frankenstein
Young Frankenstein

And, if you can catch the campy X-rated, version, see Andy Warhol's Frankenstein/Flesh for Frankenstein in 3-D.

Photo of Young Frankenstein artwork: David Marc Fischer