Monstrous!
Mel Brooks has followed up his can-you-top-this "Producers" with another surefire hit. But "Young Frankenstein" carries the fun to extremes.
NEW YORK - It has fantastical special effects and jokes that fly by like Transylvanian bats. It has Susan Stroman's lighthearted dancing and Andrea Martin's perfect comic timing as Frau Blucher, the maid whose very name scares the horses. It even has yodeling. "Mel Brooks!" is written all over the lines - here, try this one: "These are times when your brain should be the last thing on your mind!"
That's from the lissome and yodeling Sutton Foster, playing the aide to Young Frankenstein, as she tries to get his mind off work and into bed, preferably with her. But it could be the slogan for Mel Brooks' much-anticipated theatrical remake of his 1974 movie, among film's most beloved comedies.
The musical Young Frankenstein, which opened Thursday night on Broadway, is ridiculous - yo! we're talking Mel Brooks here! - and that's the point. Your brain should be the last thing on your mind. The show is great fun, much of it generated by Brooks' goofier songs and lyrics.
It's also too much of a good thing - big, brassy and overproduced, faithful to even the film's throwaway lines, and chock-a-block with shtik for the stage. It takes a bit of time to rev up, and when it gets going, it revs up and up and up. The show's creative team needn't worry about whether your brain is the last thing on your mind; at times, Young Frankenstein is the theatrical equivalent of brain freeze.
Young Frankenstein will likely be a monster hit — tickets are already flying out of the Hilton Theatre box office on 42d Street. Brooks might say, excesses, schmexcesses, who cares? After all, how else can you follow The Producers - the Tony-winningest show on Earth (a dozen), and another Brooks movie that became enshrined on Broadway with so many record-breakers you get breathless just reciting them.
While the film Young Frankenstein was a loving spoof of horror movies, the stage show is a tip of the hat to burlesque, even as it raises the stagecraft bar for American musicals. Robin Wagner has designed sufficient sets for two or three shows. They come and go effortlessly, and each is as well conceived and well executed as the last, from the train that delivers our hero to his ancestral home to the mad doctor's castle itself.
The special effects by Marc Brickman are just that - special: Sparks fly, lightning strikes, a hay-wagon ride through the forest is as real as it can be, with filmed trees moving across the stage. And Young Frankenstein's working quarters? To die for.
Before I assume that we've all seen the movie, I'll give you the two-sentence plot: Mad Dr. Frankenstein is dead, and his grandson (the jocular Roger Bart) sails from America to Transylvania. There, egged on by his humpbacked servant, Igor (Christopher Fitzgerald, perfectly bizarre), he decides to continue Grandpa's experiments, bringing a corpse back to life by installing a new brain and electrifying the body. Brooks took that basic storyline and had a blast embellishing it, and audiences responded enthusiastically.
In fact, the audience at the preview I attended laughed with glee seconds before some of the movie's best bits, transformed for the stage, unfolded. And no one could have been disappointed: A false bookcase still flummoxes the main characters, and the newly created monster (Shuler Hensley, in fine, rebuilt form) still gives out an addled version of Irving Berlin's "Puttin' on the Ritz."
Everything in between is there as well, including more jokes about male endowment than you'd hear in a middle school lunchroom. Megan Mullally, playing Young Frankenstein's fiancee, even gets a whole hummable song on the subject.
"Puttin' on the Ritz" is the prime example of the show's capacity to pummel you. In the movie, it's sung just enough for the surprise that comes with it - a monster in a tux, playing the urban swell - to make you laugh, then the plot moves on. On Broadway, it's an enormous production number, and superbly done, but by the end, after we've long since gotten the joke, we're left with one more Big Deal in a musical that, for its many good times, becomes too much of a crescendo.