Word: staging
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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...
...monster-maker's grandson returns to Transylvania and gets pulled back into the family business, probably has more laughs, and more fondly remembered bits, than any film in the Brooks canon. And Brooks (working again with his Producers writing collaborator Tom Meehan) has faithfully reproduced most of them on stage: Igor and his wandering hump; the steely Frau Blucher, whose very name incites the horses; the monster's visit to the cabin of a kindly blind man who turns into a bumbling firebug...
...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. The Producers was comedy; Young Frankenstein is shtick...
...sputtering in fury while responding.) French college students took to the streets Thursday to protest already approved educational reforms, and have pledged to join Nov. 20 strikes by public sector workers angered by plans to eliminate nearly 23,000 state-funded jobs next year. France's transport unions will stage strikes Nov. 14 to resist plans to tighten their retirement schemes - hoping for the same crippling effects of their Oct. 18 walk-outs that brought much of the country to a standstill. With similar disruption expected for much of the remaining year, Sarkozy may soon learn that winning back hearts...