Review Young Frankenstein

Young Frankenstein
Book by Mel Brooks and Thomas Meehan
Music and Lyrics by Mel Brooks
Based On The Story And Screenplay by Gene Wilder and Mel Brooks

Mel's Show Of Shows (Again 😉)
https://www.nimaxtheatres.com/shows/young-frankenstein/

Young Frankenstein is an odd re-animated creature. Mel Brooks, of course, comes with a guaranteed store of goodwill from his  fans.  So  a lot of the audience will come to Young Frankenstein determined to enjoy it.

Professor Frederick Frankenstein - Les Miserables' veteran Hadley Fraser - is quizzed on his grandfather's experiments by his keen research students.

After singing a eulogy to the organ in the body that he loves best - Yes, "You can bet your ass on the brain!", - and a fond farewell to his fiancée (a splendid Dianne Pilkington), he arrives at his family's Transylvanian family seat.

There he's greeted by Igor - comedian Ross Noble in a career-making performance. He's a family retainer who sounds like a non-bitter remnant of the ups and downs of would-be moguls of old Hollywood, "My grandfather worked for your grandfather!".

And of course there's leggy and busty blonde Inga (yes, Summer Strallen, a Brooksian Swedish blonde who's a Transylvanian lab assistant!). She introduces the American professor to a cleverly animated roll in the hay and the animation of high kicks.

Add to this musical theatre test tube concoction the stern housekeeper (Lesley Joseph) who announces with Beethoven 5th-Symphony-like- bravado "He Vas My Boyfriend!". Oh and of course Grandpa Victor's "How To" book on brain transfer and raising the dead for Frederick to follow and you have a rollicking tale.

It all proceeds wih the precise timing of an 1970s' adult nostalgia-fest pantomine, ideal for the forthcoming Happy Holiday season.  All over the world, judging from this Spanish language Mel Brooks' episode of The Simpsons!

Offensive? More out of context  - compared with the already retro black and white movie, that is.

In 1974, there were still folks alive who knew people who made the original movie and the movie manages to be both a parody and an appreciation of its creators' filmmaking skill.

If  you're under 40 and not an aspiring comedy writer or film student who has swotted up on Mel Brooks, here's the trailer of the movie.

As it is, it's an enjoyable, well-choreographed stage show with the broadbrush highlights of the movie kept, but it does become rather a different creature.

Once one could have chuckled and said how non-PC it all was, even though that already felt retro some years ago.  Now with the son of Woody Allen and Mia Farrow breaking the latest (very serious and, for want of a better word, incestuous) movieland scandal,  it feels like a tough time for bawdy humour and satire. 
 
Young Frankenstein the musical is slick and laugh-inducing with the involuntary reflex reactions to tried and trusted vaudeville and sketch humour honed on Sid Caesar's TV shows.

TLT still kicks herself for guffawing, for there's something mildly re-heated about it all. But the timing, verbal and physical, is impeccable, as befits the work of a seasoned writer, as well as pianist and drummer - Brooks was taught by Buddy Rich before he turned stand up comedian, gag and sketch writer.

It all slots satisfyingly into place There's the direction and dance routines of Susan Stroman. There's the cartoony design from Beowulf Borritt (he of Microsoft advertisement fame in case you don't believe anyone with a name like that can exist!). Excellent sound design from Gareth Owen and musical director Andrew Hilton leading the nine-piece band make the kitsch songs easy-listening.

There's even a shameless emotional manipulation of our emotions making us feel sorry for Shuler Hensler's monster never quite getting to grips with his Stein - oh, sorry, beer tankard - and  remaining thirsty while others drink. But finally the monster is transformed into a Broadway star ...     

In some ways it's as if Mel Brooks, aged 91, is being buried alive very, very comfortably,  with his stone (that's Stein in German) tombstone reading, "He was (is) a genius!" 

The thing is, he is. A genius, that is. In that he represents the spirit of a time - the Catskills comedians thrust into the brave new (or at times cowardly and cowering) world of  television in the 1950s and 1960s with something of the involuntarily television salaciousness whirling around us now and it's an amber/green light.

Review Jeepers Creepers

Jeepers Creepers

By Robert Ross

The Eyes Have It

Leicester Square Theatre

Ah, the 1970s, what a source it's been for BBC 4 biopics. 

Go back to when "I phone" meant you picked up the receiver and used your finger to dial. Take a bunch of ordinary guys and fewer gals. Use cod psychoanalysis and camera angles to magnify and simplify any ordinary faults and frailities already magnified by fame and tabloid scrutiny. And you have a perfectly enjoyable pacey rollercoaster story.  At least you should have.

Marty Feldman has lived on for new generations in repeats of Gene Wilder and Mel Brooks's Young Frankenstein and comedy fans can also peruse Robert Ross's detailed 2011 biography 

With the Carry On Team, also covered by Ross, already nabbed by Terry Johnson in his excellent stage play performed at the National Theatre back in 1998, Ross has the monopoly on  the one BBC 4 missed with the two-hander Jeepers Creepers. Maybe because as Feldman's sole biographer, he has guarded the material waiting for the right moment?

Well, Monty Python veteran Terry Jones, who knew and worked with Marty agreed to attach his name as director of the project.  With Jones on board and  Jeepers Creepers presumably named in honour of Feldman's most distinctive feature ('Jeepers Creepers, where'd ya get those peepers? Jeepers Creepers, where'd ya get those eyes?') and for Feldman's love of jazz, it all seems very promising.

On the positive side for Ross, the thinly sketched script of Jeepers Creepers has just enough in it to whet the appetite  for the book sold in the foyer. But if in the Feldman sketch everyone spoke in the voice of Sydney Lotterby, Ross's narrator's voice for the most part stifles any of this piece's dramatic potential. Save for a few moments in the second act when Rebecca Vaughan's betrayed wife Lauretta  springs to life and leads one to wonder what a stage play about betrayed first wives might be like.

As the couple and Marty solo lurch from 1974 US hotel room to hotel room, there's a bed in every scene.  Possibly an attempt to evoke a history of broadcast comedy - the Laurel and Hardy stalwart  brought to British television by Morecambe and Wise's scriptwriter Eddie Braben and, perhaps one of the much later victims of the '70s generation gone sour, Paula Yates  

There's a memento mori of a skull in the background to reflect Feldman's skeletal TV and movie persona beside the fleshy David Boyle as Feldman looking more of a Gene Wilder. Nothing wrong with that but Boyle struggles with the lack of pace in script and direction and his truthful imitation of Marty's subdued thoughtful tone, unlike the aggressive sharp-beaked TV persona, only serves to emphasize an under powered production determined to index rather than grow organically with subtext the facts of Feldman's life.  

Perhaps Ross, with his knowledge across the period, would have spread his playwriting wings more if he had chosen to write about a fictional career spanning jazz, music hall, radio, television, movies, drugs and drink in the context of the times. A generic 1970s' manslaughter of a celebrity. But what we have is an amber/red light for this plodding amble through a life and talent which merits a more insightful exploration.