YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN Reviews

It's a bit early for the major critics to start chiming in, but since this is the mega-hyped show of the season, a couple of reviews from some unusual sources are already online. Might as well toss them in the mix:


Blogcritics.org is Mixed-to-Positive:

"The new Broadway musical Young Frankenstein is nothing if not too much. It has to be colossal, larger than life, overwhelming – being a fun little musical is not an option. If it hasn’t knocked you out of your seat, it’s a failure. Or so the hype and expectation would lead you to believe. The preview audience I saw it with was determined to have a great time, and indeed they seemed to get what they wanted......

.....As at Spamalot, another Broadway hit based on a beloved 1970s film comedy, the audience anticipates the familiar material, and applauds and laughs at the setups, preparing to go wild over the old jokes before they ever actually happen. This phenomenon is mildly amusing in itself, but spontaneous it ain’t.

There is new material as well, some good, some less so, but the audience’s need to re-experience the movie’s highlights is a bit of a trap, at least for the book (co-written by Brooks and Thomas Meehan). Brooks’s music and lyrics may be uneven, but they are his best opportunity to create something new here. The songs are pleasingly well crafted and, I’m happy to report, appropriately ridiculous.........The people behind this show are making a Herculean effort. But they might actually be better off relaxing a bit and just being funny. When they do that, and it does happen several times in 150 minutes, this over-amplified, overgrown theme-park ride of a show seems worth all the fuss.

http://blogcritics.org/archives/2007/11/08/134214.php



New York Jewish Week is a Rave:

"He may not have invented Hollywood, but the irrepressible Brooks certainly reinvented it in the last few decades of the 20th century, opening up a genre of no-holds-barred satire that ultimately spawned everything from the “Airplane” series to the work of Sarah Silverman and Sacha Baron Cohen. Now, with the double whammy of “The Producers” and “Young Frankenstein,” Brooks has also resurrected and redefined the Broadway book musical.

By modeling his musicals so closely on his own classic films that he can directly import the characters, plot and even most of the lines (adding tuneful but forgettable songs, and using over-the-top special effects and extravagant production numbers), Brooks has come up with a sure-fire formula for the most profitable kind of splashy, low-brow entertainment one can imagine.

While the cast lacks a box office star of the stature of Nathan Lane or Matthew Broderick, Brooks has put together a team of extremely gifted performers, and many of them virtually eclipse the memories of their predecessors in the 1974 cult classic. This does not, unfortunately, include Roger Bart, who, while he was superb in the role of Carmen Ghia in “The Producers,” here plays the mad scientist without the fierce intelligence and carefully calibrated hysteria of the incomparable Gene Wilder. Bart’s performance is more reminiscent of the low-key work of the late John Ritter, with his trademark befuddled and benighted air......

....All of this is clearly very timely; there are many connections one could make with the current debates about stem-cell research, cloning and the uses of bioengineering. But what makes this theme also deeply Jewish, besides the fun that Brooks still likes to poke at German accents, is the fantasy that it enacts of the Jew as the self-aware, perennial outsider. (What Jew wouldn’t want to trade Eddie Cantor for Fred Astaire?) Brooks once said of the film that the Monster represents the part of Victor that the mob hates — his imagination. The story, then, is about the triumph of creativity, which becomes, as in the classic Jewish legend of the Golem, the true source of power. No one has done a better job than Brooks of taking the feelings of inferiority engendered by Jewish vulnerability and transmuting them into both cinematic and theatrical gold."

http://www.thejewishweek.com/viewArticle/c346_a954/The_Arts/Theatre.html

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Updated On: 11/8/07 at 06:19 PM

"But a show that could have been a blast ends up being just good enough.
While that limitation seems destined to engender little admiration in the theater community, it's unlikely to deter the tourist traffic vital to keep an expensive production like this afloat on Broadway. "

Such a perfectly worded assessment. I strongly agree.

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I think Mixed is the word that will pop up a lot tonight

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I never thought Roger Bart was bad in the show at all, But i did agree with the review saying a lot of the problems for him come from the book itself

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The AP is Mixed:

""Young Frankenstein" arrives with a lot of baggage, most notably its inevitable comparison to Brooks' 1974 movie version, which, for some, represents comic celluloid nirvana. Buffs will recognize — and recite along with the actors — jokes from the movie. Brooks and Thomas Meehan, who collaborated on the new book, have gone out of their way to add some new ones, not all of which land with precision. But the stage version follows the film pretty closely.

Brooks also wrote the music and lyrics, and his pale pastiche of a score echoes — none too memorably — the works of such seasoned songsmiths as Rodgers and Hammerstein, Kander and Ebb and a bit of Cole Porter thrown in for good measure. With lyrics such as "There is nothing like the brain" (sorry, R&H), the standard of wit descends pretty rapidly.........

....The film — in glorious black and white — lovingly sends up monster movies of yore. The musical's intentions aren't as clear since song and dance get in the way of the parody, diluting the spoofing."




http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/11/09/arts/NA-A-E-STG-US-Young-Frankenstein.php

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I knew when the show was announced it would not be another love fest with the critics.

Having said that & despite my brother in laws pa of the show, the BWW video looks good. We look forward to seeing it in March.

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Problem with the Variety review-
How is the 1968 Producers movie "almost-unwatchable?" I thinks it holds up wonderfully and is better than the musical.

Talkin Broadway is Mixed-to-Negative:

"What's conspicuously missing is the sense that any of this is answering a greater theatrical calling, and that's what most distinguishes this show from its predecessor. Brooks realized that the cynical grit of his earlier show's source film was unsuited to a snappy stage Valentine, and jettisoned it (and a number of other things) in favor of a bigger and brighter Broadwayization on the same general theme. Replicating every bit, no matter how bite-sized or how dependent on the film's innate intimacy, makes Young Frankenstein more dutiful than droll. Worse, it forces everyone onstage to restrain themselves from unleashing their own charismatic uniqueness, when the film leads (including Gene Wilder, Madeline Kahn, and Cloris Leachman) doing just that made them a group for the record books.

No one is more at sea than Bart, whose entire characterization seems based on Elaine Stritch having a bad hair day. His throat-splitting yells and balcony-licking grimaces dispel more comedy than they create, and are out of place for a character who only grudgingly accepts his mad-scientist birthright. .......

.... None, however, ever ascends to the delirious stratosphere of entertainment the original Producers cast members attained, and none can make Brooks's stage-bound book (written with Thomas Meehan) and score soar to the rafters......The most integrated number (of course from the film) is one Brooks didn't write: Irving Berlin's "Puttin' on the Ritz," which satirizes the show's mock-Pygmalion implications more effectively than anything else.

It does this in spite of Stroman, who either needs to buy a bigger bag of tricks or stop pulling from the one that's propelled her career for almost two decades. Her hard-sell staging and reliance on dances in lines, dances with props, and dances full of stomp and fury yet signifying nothing display their age and inappropriateness when not servicing the show-biz glitz that's her preferred territory..........

.... Making things appear better than they are is the ultimate raison d'etre of Young Frankenstein, which is so intent on being what it isn't that it never realizes its own inherent potential - it has to settle for being moderately amusing and never full-out funny. Its failures, however, are entirely its own: The problem with Young Frankenstein isn't that it's not The Producers. It's that it doesn't produce."

http://www.talkinbroadway.com/world/YoungFrankenstein.html

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Updated On: 11/8/07 at 08:07 PM

What is the Blazzing Saddles musical lyrics in the curtain call that Variety mentions?

Its not looking good for this show

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How long before the premium seating price is reduced along with the number offered?

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He will be rethinking this after the reviews are all out.

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Miss Pennywise, if you read the whole review, Murray says just enough nice things about the cast and design team to justify calling it "Mixed" (though I suppose it might lean towards "Mixed-to-Negative").

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