YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN Reviews- Page 4

[songanddanceman2]

Posted: 11/8/07 at 10:11pm

are you trying to say Hot Feet and Pirate Queen were flops lol

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 11/8/07 at 10:11pm

The Times is .... well..... OUCH:

"We may as well start with the obvious questions about “Young Frankenstein,” the really big show from Mel Brooks that opened last night at the Hilton Theater. The answer to all of them is no.

No, it is not nearly as good as “The Producers,” Mr. Brooks’s previous Broadway musical. No, it is not as much fun as the 1974 Mel Brooks movie, also called “Young Frankenstein,” on which it is based. No, it does not provide $450 worth of pleasure (that being its record-setting price for “premier seating”).

Well, unless you measure your pleasure in decibels. Even by the blaring standards of Broadway, “Young Frankenstein,” directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman, stands out for its loudness — in its ear-splitting amplification, eye-splitting visual effects and would-be side-splitting jokes. It’s as if the production had been built on the premise that its audiences would be slow on the uptake and hard of hearing, the sort of folks who would say: “That pun flew right by me. Could you repeat it a couple of times, louder?”

There’s no denying that this hopped-up stage version of Mr. Brooks’s movie, about a brilliant American doctor who finds his heart (among other body parts) in Transylvania, looks like it cost every penny of its reported $16 million-plus budget. Much of Robin Wagner’s comic-book gothic set could fit right into that gold standard of family-friendly scariness, the Haunted Mansion at Disney World.

Still, as newly rich New Yorkers learn every day, money can’t buy you flair. It can’t even buy you laughs. “Young Frankenstein” — which features songs by Mr. Brooks and a book by Mr. Brooks and Thomas Meehan, his collaborator on “The Producers” — certainly has a high density of talent. It also surely has the hardest-working supersize ensemble, led by an amiable but overwhelmed Roger Bart, and the largest percentage of gags per scene.

Some of those gags, many of which are lifted from the movie, are pretty funny. (O.K., let’s be honest: I laughed exactly three times.) There are some enjoyable musical routines. (All right, my count is 2 out of nearly 20.) And if the headline stars, Mr. Bart (in the title role) and Megan Mullally (as his Park Avenue fiancée), don’t feel naturally wedded to their roles, the production does offer confirmation of the distinctive, very different talents of Sutton Foster, Shuler Hensley and Andrea Martin.

The show takes many of the elements that made “The Producers” such a delight and then saps them of their joy by overselling them."



http://theater2.nytimes.com/2007/11/09/theater/reviews/09fran.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1194577747-jONSG+f8x9YSCXQWmIIhKw

Updated On: 11/8/07 at 10:11 PM

[frogs_fan85]

Posted: 11/8/07 at 10:12pm

I love that when I clicked on the link to the NYT full review I was first taken to an ad page for Young Frankenstein!!

[Broadwaywest2]

Posted: 11/8/07 at 10:12pm

Part one from the review that matters: The NY Times


We may as well start with the obvious questions about “Young Frankenstein,” the really big show from Mel Brooks that opened last night at the Hilton Theater. The answer to all of them is no.


No, it is not nearly as good as “The Producers,” Mr. Brooks’s previous Broadway musical. No, it is not as much fun as the 1974 Mel Brooks movie, also called “Young Frankenstein,” on which it is based. No, it does not provide $450 worth of pleasure (that being its record-setting price for “premier seating”).

Well, unless you measure your pleasure in decibels. Even by the blaring standards of Broadway, “Young Frankenstein,” directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman, stands out for its loudness — in its ear-splitting amplification, eye-splitting visual effects and would-be side-splitting jokes. It’s as if the production had been built on the premise that its audiences would be slow on the uptake and hard of hearing, the sort of folks who would say: “That pun flew right by me. Could you repeat it a couple of times, louder?”

There’s no denying that this hopped-up stage version of Mr. Brooks’s movie, about a brilliant American doctor who finds his heart (among other body parts) in Transylvania, looks like it cost every penny of its reported $16 million-plus budget. Much of Robin Wagner’s comic-book gothic set could fit right into that gold standard of family-friendly scariness, the Haunted Mansion at Disney World.

Still, as newly rich New Yorkers learn every day, money can’t buy you flair. It can’t even buy you laughs. “Young Frankenstein” — which features songs by Mr. Brooks and a book by Mr. Brooks and Thomas Meehan, his collaborator on “The Producers” — certainly has a high density of talent. It also surely has the hardest-working supersize ensemble, led by an amiable but overwhelmed Roger Bart, and the largest percentage of gags per scene.

Some of those gags, many of which are lifted from the movie, are pretty funny. (O.K., let’s be honest: I laughed exactly three times.) There are some enjoyable musical routines. (All right, my count is 2 out of nearly 20.) And if the headline stars, Mr. Bart (in the title role) and Megan Mullally (as his Park Avenue fiancée), don’t feel naturally wedded to their roles, the production does offer confirmation of the distinctive, very different talents of Sutton Foster, Shuler Hensley and Andrea Martin.

The show takes many of the elements that made “The Producers” such a delight and then saps them of their joy by overselling them. The problem is partly the source material. “The Producers” was originally a 1968 movie about putting on a musical. In translating it to the stage, Mr. Brooks, Mr. Meehan and Ms. Stroman filled it with both an insider’s sardonic knowingness and a fan’s affection. Amid the show’s sea of clever industry caricatures were two real characters: the producers themselves, Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom, embodied as an exhilarating double act by Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick.

The film of “Young Frankenstein,” which Pauline Kael called Mr. Brooks’s “most sustained piece of moviemaking,” was a different kettle of celluloid, a genre pastiche of Depression-era American monster movies. Mr. Brooks scrupulously honored the style of those films, even to the point of shooting it in black-and-white, and then tossed in a stink bomb of Catskills humor.

It’s not impossible to simulate dark vintage movies onstage. (The Broadway-bound British recreation of Hitchcock’s “39 Steps” is proof of that.) But it’s a lot harder if your first objective is to be bawdy, bouncy and colorful. Despite its fidelity to the film’s script, “The New Mel Brooks Musical Young Frankenstein” (to use its sprawling official title) feels less like a sustained book musical than an overblown burlesque revue, right down to its giggly smuttiness.

Ms. Stroman seems to take the show one joke at a time: land this gag, milk it for as long as possible and then mark time with some standard-issue ensemble dancing until you move on to the next . As with “Spamalot,” another (and much better) movie-inspired musical, you can sense people in the audience anticipating their favorite jokes from the film and roaring even before the punch lines. Similarly, the performances operate on a gag-by-gag basis. This vaudeville sensibility may account for the disconnectedness of Mr. Bart’s Frederick Frankenstein. (It may also come from Mr. Bart’s reportedly having injured his back during previews.) But as the New York doctor who in 1934 visits Transylvania to settle his grandfather’s estate and winds up moving in to make monsters, Mr. Bart sort of disappears.

He can sing, he can dance, he can sell a funny line in several different styles. In a filigree supporting role, like the serpentine Carmen Ghia in “The Producers,” he can be a knockout. But here he doesn’t create a continuous character. (I felt the same way when I saw him as Leo in “The Producers.”) And he lacks that wild-eyed glint of ambition run amok that every mad scientist needs.

As Elizabeth, Victor’s high-strung fiancée, Ms. Mullally (late of the sitcom “Will & Grace”) is obviously doing her best to banish memories of the brilliant Madeline Kahn, who created the part on screen. Looking more like a matron than a madcap heiress in William Ivey Long’s swanky costumes, Ms. Mullally instead imitates several 1930s movie actresses (Mary Boland, Irene Dunne, Shirley Temple, even Margaret Dumont), without settling on any one. And though Christopher Fitzgerald is a gifted singing comic, it seems odd to cast a cherub in the role of the demented Igor.

On the plus side (the slimmer side), Sutton Foster (of “Thoroughly Modern Millie” and “The Drowsy Chaperone”) is delicious as Dr. Frankenstein’s voluptuous young assistant, who uses yodeling as foreplay. (The deadpan friskiness of her “Roll in the Hay” is a high point.) Andrea Martin, an inspired comedian, makes the role of Frau Blucher, the sinister housekeeper, all her own through artful exaggeration. And Shuler Hensley (Judd in the most recent Broadway revival of “Oklahoma!”) is terrific, turning Frankenstein’s monster into the most human character onstage.

[rosscoe(au)]

Posted: 11/8/07 at 10:12pm

"Oh, rosscoe, whether you were serious or not, you KNOW that Mel Brooks is seriously thinking about how he could get away with doing it on stage. There's even a joke about that in YF, at the curtain call."

I had no idea, what is the joke at the curtian call, something like see you in two years with Blazing?

Also just a quick thread jack, is the Hilton the same theatre that "Starlight Express" played in?

[Broadwaywest2]

Posted: 11/8/07 at 10:12pm

Part one from the review that matters: The NY Times


We may as well start with the obvious questions about “Young Frankenstein,” the really big show from Mel Brooks that opened last night at the Hilton Theater. The answer to all of them is no.


No, it is not nearly as good as “The Producers,” Mr. Brooks’s previous Broadway musical. No, it is not as much fun as the 1974 Mel Brooks movie, also called “Young Frankenstein,” on which it is based. No, it does not provide $450 worth of pleasure (that being its record-setting price for “premier seating”).

Well, unless you measure your pleasure in decibels. Even by the blaring standards of Broadway, “Young Frankenstein,” directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman, stands out for its loudness — in its ear-splitting amplification, eye-splitting visual effects and would-be side-splitting jokes. It’s as if the production had been built on the premise that its audiences would be slow on the uptake and hard of hearing, the sort of folks who would say: “That pun flew right by me. Could you repeat it a couple of times, louder?”

There’s no denying that this hopped-up stage version of Mr. Brooks’s movie, about a brilliant American doctor who finds his heart (among other body parts) in Transylvania, looks like it cost every penny of its reported $16 million-plus budget. Much of Robin Wagner’s comic-book gothic set could fit right into that gold standard of family-friendly scariness, the Haunted Mansion at Disney World.

Still, as newly rich New Yorkers learn every day, money can’t buy you flair. It can’t even buy you laughs. “Young Frankenstein” — which features songs by Mr. Brooks and a book by Mr. Brooks and Thomas Meehan, his collaborator on “The Producers” — certainly has a high density of talent. It also surely has the hardest-working supersize ensemble, led by an amiable but overwhelmed Roger Bart, and the largest percentage of gags per scene.

Some of those gags, many of which are lifted from the movie, are pretty funny. (O.K., let’s be honest: I laughed exactly three times.) There are some enjoyable musical routines. (All right, my count is 2 out of nearly 20.) And if the headline stars, Mr. Bart (in the title role) and Megan Mullally (as his Park Avenue fiancée), don’t feel naturally wedded to their roles, the production does offer confirmation of the distinctive, very different talents of Sutton Foster, Shuler Hensley and Andrea Martin.

The show takes many of the elements that made “The Producers” such a delight and then saps them of their joy by overselling them. The problem is partly the source material. “The Producers” was originally a 1968 movie about putting on a musical. In translating it to the stage, Mr. Brooks, Mr. Meehan and Ms. Stroman filled it with both an insider’s sardonic knowingness and a fan’s affection. Amid the show’s sea of clever industry caricatures were two real characters: the producers themselves, Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom, embodied as an exhilarating double act by Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick.

The film of “Young Frankenstein,” which Pauline Kael called Mr. Brooks’s “most sustained piece of moviemaking,” was a different kettle of celluloid, a genre pastiche of Depression-era American monster movies. Mr. Brooks scrupulously honored the style of those films, even to the point of shooting it in black-and-white, and then tossed in a stink bomb of Catskills humor.

It’s not impossible to simulate dark vintage movies onstage. (The Broadway-bound British recreation of Hitchcock’s “39 Steps” is proof of that.) But it’s a lot harder if your first objective is to be bawdy, bouncy and colorful. Despite its fidelity to the film’s script, “The New Mel Brooks Musical Young Frankenstein” (to use its sprawling official title) feels less like a sustained book musical than an overblown burlesque revue, right down to its giggly smuttiness.

Ms. Stroman seems to take the show one joke at a time: land this gag, milk it for as long as possible and then mark time with some standard-issue ensemble dancing until you move on to the next . As with “Spamalot,” another (and much better) movie-inspired musical, you can sense people in the audience anticipating their favorite jokes from the film and roaring even before the punch lines. Similarly, the performances operate on a gag-by-gag basis. This vaudeville sensibility may account for the disconnectedness of Mr. Bart’s Frederick Frankenstein. (It may also come from Mr. Bart’s reportedly having injured his back during previews.) But as the New York doctor who in 1934 visits Transylvania to settle his grandfather’s estate and winds up moving in to make monsters, Mr. Bart sort of disappears.

He can sing, he can dance, he can sell a funny line in several different styles. In a filigree supporting role, like the serpentine Carmen Ghia in “The Producers,” he can be a knockout. But here he doesn’t create a continuous character. (I felt the same way when I saw him as Leo in “The Producers.”) And he lacks that wild-eyed glint of ambition run amok that every mad scientist needs.

As Elizabeth, Victor’s high-strung fiancée, Ms. Mullally (late of the sitcom “Will & Grace”) is obviously doing her best to banish memories of the brilliant Madeline Kahn, who created the part on screen. Looking more like a matron than a madcap heiress in William Ivey Long’s swanky costumes, Ms. Mullally instead imitates several 1930s movie actresses (Mary Boland, Irene Dunne, Shirley Temple, even Margaret Dumont), without settling on any one. And though Christopher Fitzgerald is a gifted singing comic, it seems odd to cast a cherub in the role of the demented Igor.

On the plus side (the slimmer side), Sutton Foster (of “Thoroughly Modern Millie” and “The Drowsy Chaperone”) is delicious as Dr. Frankenstein’s voluptuous young assistant, who uses yodeling as foreplay. (The deadpan friskiness of her “Roll in the Hay” is a high point.) Andrea Martin, an inspired comedian, makes the role of Frau Blucher, the sinister housekeeper, all her own through artful exaggeration. And Shuler Hensley (Judd in the most recent Broadway revival of “Oklahoma!”) is terrific, turning Frankenstein’s monster into the most human character onstage.

[Broadwaywest2]

Posted: 11/8/07 at 10:12pm

Part two from the review that matters: The NY Times


If I haven’t said much about the musical numbers, it’s because they mostly blend together. Mr. Brooks’s songs have a throwaway quality, as if they were dashed off on the day of the performance, and mostly they lack the witty affection for period styles of “The Producers.” Ms. Stroman, too, often seems on automatic pilot as a choreographer.

There is one truly exhilarating number, though you have to sit through most of the show before it arrives. It comes when Dr. Frankenstein introduces his show-business-trained creature to the world by having him perform Irving Berlin’s “Puttin’ On the Ritz.” Ms. Stroman pulls out all the stops (and most of the usual contents of her bag of dance tricks) for this one, evoking a catalog of top-hat styles. But what really makes it fly is Mr. Hensley’s evocation of the monster’s pleasure in what he’s doing. This big galoot of a mannequin is being seduced by the singular joys of musical comedy and loving it. For the first and only time in the show, so are we.

This jolt of feeling isn’t enough to erase the impression that from its opening number, “Young Frankenstein” has never stopped screeching at you. This means that: (a) it has soon worn out its voice, and (b) it leaves you with a monster-size headache.
Updated On: 11/8/07 at 10:12 PM

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 11/8/07 at 10:15pm

That may very well hold the record for the largest triple post in BWW history.

[rosscoe(au)]

Posted: 11/8/07 at 10:15pm

I always wanted $450 worth of pleasure, it just seems this wont be it!

[frogs_fan85]

Posted: 11/8/07 at 10:17pm

Starlight Express was in the Gershwin.

[Broadwaywest2]

Posted: 11/8/07 at 10:17pm

Sorry about that total accident. thought it wasn't going through

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 11/8/07 at 10:18pm

Starlight Express actually played the Gershwin -- (the barn where WICKED is currently playing).

[rosscoe(au)]

Posted: 11/8/07 at 10:18pm

Quick threadjack once more, is the Gershwin still standing and if so what is in there now?


Margo answered while i was posting, thanks.

Updated On: 11/8/07 at 10:18 PM

[frogs_fan85]

Posted: 11/8/07 at 10:19pm

Wicked.

[tomemiller]

Posted: 11/8/07 at 10:25pm

The Gershwin first opened as the Uris Theatre and Sweeney Todd was the first show performed there. (Correction stated later; Sweeney opened in 1979; thanks Husk_Charmer for the correction)
Updated On: 11/9/07 at 10:25 PM

[miss pennywise]

Posted: 11/8/07 at 10:25pm

Brantley's review is pretty much what was to be expected, don't you think?

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 11/8/07 at 10:25pm

The Neward Star-Ledger is Mixed-to-Negative:

"Not a great musical, nor even a particularly good one, "Young Frankenstein" is a reasonably funny event and several performers are mighty fine. Don't stampede to see it. Those titanic ticket prices will soon sink and probably in a year or two this attraction will even be available on the TKTS discount line.....

....For ticket buyers who enjoy seeing more of what they already know, the production hangs together decently and should prove satisfying.

The loudly orchestrated score, however, is a disappointing batch of obvious lyrics and melodies echoing 1950s show tunes.

While staging these matters efficiently, director-choreographer Susan Stroman demonstrates little of her customary flair with the dances. The villagers' romp, the creature stomps and the movement of it all is surprisingly ordinary......

.... A so-so show neither bad nor good, "Young Frankenstein" is a big, patched-together entertainment packing plenty of laughs, even if 90 percent of them are recycled. Does that make this a "green" musical? Anyway, let the tourists go first and catch up with it later."
http://www.nj.com/entertainment/arts/index.ssf/2007/11/not_monstrous_just_mediocre.html

Updated On: 11/8/07 at 10:25 PM

[songanddanceman2]

Posted: 11/8/07 at 10:26pm

Just looked at some pics of the theatre, its pretty big but pretty cold looking (not as in heat lol)

[zooxanthellae]

Posted: 11/8/07 at 10:27pm

Its almost depressing to see such awful reviews for a show that had so much potential and great talent involved... however I throughly agree with everyone else that a show with such names on it as "Mel Brooks" and "Young Frankenstein," is virtually critic proof, and will certainly have a healthy run... remember not all of the most successful shows got great reviews... Do Not expect to see this going anywhere anytime soon... hell, I know I'm still excited to see it!

[songanddanceman2]

Posted: 11/8/07 at 10:29pm

Thats True

I mean here in the UK the critics savaged Les Miserables when it opened

[miss pennywise]

Posted: 11/8/07 at 10:31pm

The weird thing is that I agree with the critics but I still enjoyed myself. How does that work???

[songanddanceman2]

Posted: 11/8/07 at 10:33pm

i was bored during act 1 (out of town) but loved act 2

Its more like an event than a great show, if that makes sense?

[cooperross]

Posted: 11/8/07 at 10:35pm

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

I expect to see those prices drop very soon. As I mentioned today in another thread on this show"

if the stagehands go on strike, how much you wanna bet Mel WILL be getting those premium prices?

[husk_charmer]

Posted: 11/8/07 at 10:39pm

Tomemiller-
You would be wrong about that. The Uris opened in 1972, with "Via Galactica" (Originally titled "Up!" but changed when they realized the marquee would be "Up! Uris")

It changed to the Gershwin either during the run of the 1983 revival of "Show Boat" or the 1983 revival of "Mame"

[songanddanceman2]

Posted: 11/8/07 at 10:40pm

Via galactica ....classic (how did it not work lolol)