Word: broadwayize
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...lightning strike twice? The Producers, Mel Brooks's musicalized version of his 1967 film comedy, was an out-of-the-blue, ain't-Broadway-grand surprise when it opened in the spring of 2001. A septuagenarian funnyman adapts one of his old movies for the stage, writes the songs himself, indulges all his vulgar-vaudevillian comic impulses, and shows the Broadway pros how to do it - what could be more thrilling? And so, when Brooks went back to his film archives to perform the same trick with Young Frankenstein, his horror-movie spoof from 1974, the buzz on Broadway...
...Well, the sparks surely fly in Young Frankenstein's oversized '30s-horror-film stage laboratory. But the show, which opened Thursday night at Broadway's Hilton Theatre, is missing much of the electricity that made The Producers such a monster...
...difference is that The Producers had a solid, even ingenious, comic storyline - about a Broadway producer who sets out to create a bomb show so he can run off with all the investors' money. Young Frankenstein is, by contrast, mainly a series of goofs on old horror-movie clichés - gags that don't resonate as well on stage, and that lack the comic propulsion that keeps The Producers moving along. That puts a lot more burden on the usual Brooksian jokes about big knockers and small penises - which, as a result, seem more desperate this time around...
Getting mixed reviews. JENNIFER GARNER, for her Broadway debut as Roxane in the revival of Cyrano de Bergerac...
Young Frankenstein Broadway's Hilton Theatre; opened Nov. 8Can lightning strike twice? Plenty of sparks fly in Young Frankenstein, Mel Brooks' follow-up to his big hit The Producers. But this time the gags are lamer, the songs (again by Brooks) more generic, and there's no Nathan Lane--though the monster's big moment, doing Puttin' on the Ritz in top hat and wails, almost saves the show. Almost...