Puttin’ on the Ritz
Recently we had the pleasure of seeing the new live musical production of Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein with some of Jenny’s coworkers. It opened here in Seattle in preparation for its Broadway run, and we got to see it in its first week.
This is not the first Broadway show to test the waters in Seattle: The musical production of John Waters’s Hairspray opened here first and went on to a long, successful Broadway run (and is now even a motion picture, meaning it’s gone from a movie to a musical to a movie again). We’ve heard that two other Seattle pre-Broadway shows are in the works, and we couldn’t be more delighted. Yes, please, producers, test your theatre on us!
Like any big Broadway production these days, the show was all song and spectacle – so much song, in fact, that afterward at dinner some of our companions launched a game of “Which Songs Are They Going to Have to Cut to Get the Show Time Down?” It did at times feel like a succession of songs strung together with a few threads of dialogue.
But some of the songs were terrific, particularly those sung by Megan Mullally, who plays the Madeline Kahn role in her own inimitable and formidable way. Mullally was riveting on stage, one of the few actors who built a new version of her character instead of simply imitating the actor from the screen version. She was saucy and sexy, and the crowd adored her. And boy can that lady sing.
Andrea Martin, who will always be “from SCTV” despite a long and splendid career, was a lot of fun as Frau Blucher. She had a great, silly song but was also just a blast to watch. Martin is a terrific comedic actor.
All of the acting was New York–caliber, the nostalgic nods to the best lines and scenes of the film were much appreciated, and the sets were varied and exciting. If we have any complaint, it’s our complaint about all big, splashy Broadway theatre, which is a minor one: just that it’s all very entertaining and whatnot but ultimately not enlightening or even moving. It’s fun while it’s happening, like eating a decadent dessert, but afterward you have a twinge of regret and wonder why you did it. Then you think to yourself, “Well, it was fun! That’s reason enough” and get over it.
Young Frankenstein is clearly hoping to capitalize on the humongous success of an earlier Broadway hit based on a Mel Brooks movie, The Producers. Having never seen the musical version of The Producers, it’s hard for us to compare, but our gut feeling is that Young Frankenstein was a more accessible and perhaps (?) more popular movie, and our most conservative guess is that the musical version will be, if not a runaway hit like The Producers, then a solid success.