The musical Young Frankenstein is a delight
At the age of 91, Mel Brooks is still making people howl with laughter. Howl, you might say, like werewolves. At the Garrick, audiences are rising to their feet in thanks for the mirth he has given the world over the years, and for what he has now done with Young Frankenstein, his celebrated spoof Thirties horror film.
So what has he done? Well, stuck songs in it, obviously. This is a musical rehash of a celluloid comedy masterpiece just as The Producers was before it. Where the latter was a natural fit for the theatre, though, here Brooks has run a greater risk by putting his black-and-white send-up into colour. And while his designer – the fabulously named Beowulf Boritt – has stayed faithful to the Gothic aesthetic of the 1974 film, there’s no easy way of bringing the aura of the silver screen to the stage: you can’t do close-ups in a playhouse. Best leave it in the vaults? Some critics in New York thought so when the show arrived on Broadway 10 years ago.
However, while it doesn’t reach the same zenith of inspired zaniness as The Producers, the fact is that Brooksy has pulled it off. You somehow get the best of both worlds. The script (a book cowritten by Thomas Meehan) fillets the original for many of its best gags, while the song-and-dance routines amplify the spirit of the beast without distorting it. The lyrics are as spry as director Susan Stroman’s witty choreography, with healthy (not entirely childfriendly) doses of bawdy: “Though your genitalia has been known to fail ya, you can bet your a--- on the brain,” warbles Frederick Frankenstein, the scientist so ashamed of his family past he pronounces it “Fronkensteen”. This tongue-twisting, synapse-testing opening number sets the tone of affectionate pastiche, stitching the twitching limbs of old Broadway on to the skeleton of old Hollywood.
The most famous sequence in the film comes when the Creature – brought to life when Frankenstein returns to his family lair in Transylvania – performs Irving Berlin’s Puttin’ on the Ritz in top hat and tails. The routine proves as hilarious as is required here, a lumbering, greenfaced Shuler Hensley combining doe-eyed sincerity with the sort of yowls usually associated with painful dentistry.
Hadley Fraser’s madly beaming Frankenstein and Geordie comic Ross Noble as Igor, his hunchbacked sidekick, form a sensational, strenuously hard-working double act. They won’t – can’t – eclipse the memories, for fans, of Gene Wilder and Marty Feldman, but the shadows of those dearly departed stars don’t loom intrusively large either. Noble in particular – making his theatrical debut – is a revelation, courting physical injury by continually contorting himself inside his black cape, his moon-face combining low-level cunning with lobotomised gormlessness.
Added to this are show-stealing turns wherever you look: Lesley Joseph as the hatchet-faced castlekeeper, Frau Blucher; Dianne Pilkington as Frederick’s tactilityaverse sweetheart, Elizabeth; Summer Strallen a yodelling hoot as the buxom and obliging Inga; even Patrick Clancy makes his mark as the blind Hermit, lending the irreverent romp a note of beatific grace as he croons a ditty of lonely yearning.
Not a profound evening, then, yet it celebrates the oddball tendency in humanity in a way that might just have met with Mary Shelley’s approval. I’m awarding it a “mere” four stars because I don’t think audiences should go in over-expectant – and clearly fans will get more out of it than the uninitiated – but I expect the majority to hand it that extra star themselves on the way out. Very silly, and entirely welcome.