Theatre: Young Frankenstein

Garrick Theatre, London WC2 (0330-333 4811). Until 29 September 2018 Running time: 2hrs 20mins

Mel Brooks was recently asked how he thought London critics would respond to this musical version of his much-loved 1974 spoof horror movie. “They’ll say, ‘It’s good, but it’s not as great as The Producers,’” was the writer’s prediction. “Well, for this critic,” said Michael Billington in The Guardian, Young Frankenstein is “every bit as good, if not better.” Adapted by Brooks from the version seen on Broadway ten years ago, this show “piles on the gags even more relentlessly” than The Producers, and at the same time “wittily parodies” musicals past and present. A fabulous “love letter to the rackety world of American vaudeville”, it is “two-and-a-half hours of time-suspending pleasure”: an evening of “gloriously impure fun”.

I thought it was good, but not as great as The Producers, said Ian Shuttleworth in the FT. The main reason it’s not in the same “humdinger” class is mostly to do with the source material. The Producers, being a stage musical about an extravagant stage musical entitled Springtime for Hitler, “had to attain a corresponding extravagance” of scale. By comparison, Young Frankenstein – in which American professor of neurology Frederick Frankenstein is lured back to Transylvania to sell off his grandfather’s rambling Gothic pile – is almost a “chamber comedy”. It’s a fun evening, yes – but you’d be hard pushed to

★★★★

call it a theatrical landmark.

Maybe not, said Paul Taylor in The Independent, but it’s a hell of a show all the same. The “first-rate” British cast won’t efface fans’ memories of Gene Wilder, Marty Feldman and co in the film, but they easily make the roles their own. Hadley Fraser has “a wonderful dynamism” as Frederick, “perfectly gauging the balance between near-hysteria and unforced comic charm”. And Geordie comic Ross Noble is an utter “revelation”, making a triumphant theatrical debut as hunchbacked sidekick Igor, said Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph. In addition, there are “show-stealing turns wherever you look” – not the least from Lesley Joseph, who is brilliant as the hatchet-faced castle-keeper Frau Blücher. In sum: “very silly and entirely welcome”. The week’s other opening

Beginning Dorfman, National Theatre, London SE1 (020-7452 3000). Until 14 November

Justine Mitchell and Sam Troughton both excel in this twohander by David Eldridge about the start of a relationship. The play “leaves you caring deeply” about its “damaged” characters and brings “unusual poignancy to the dating game” (Guardian).