Young Frankenstein: The New Mel Brooks Musical

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Amazon.com
Unlike The Producers, the musical version of Young Frankenstein was not met with critical adoration when it opened on Broadway in November, 2007. Mel Brooks had followed the same formula, transferring all of his own source movie's famous lines and plot points to the stage, but oddly, the cast album works better than the stage production, which is indeed often lumbering. Brooks' songs are still fairly derivative but here, undistracted by director Susan Stroman's flat staging, you can focus more on Doug Besterman's excellent orchestrations and on the adept cast itself. As Dr. "Fronkensteen," Roger Bart is much less grating than on stage, for instance. As Inga, Sutton Foster exhibits some mad yodeling skills in "Roll in the Hay" and sounds like a classic Broadway babe on "Listen to Your Heart." Megan Mullally (Elizabeth) sells "Please Don't Touch Me," "Deep Love," and "Alone" (a bonus track cut from the show), while Andrea Martin (Frau Blucher) kills with the Brecht-Weill pastiche "He Vas My Boyfriend." And yes, Irving Berlin's "Puttin' on the Ritz" is included, complete with monster grunts and a long tap passage in this extended version. The show may not be worth the hype, but the recording is a pleasant surprise. --Elisabeth Vincentelli

Amazon.com
ORIGINAL CAST RECORDING YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN MUSIC AND LYRICS BY MEL BROOKS -- IT'S ALIVE!

From the creators of the record-breaking Broadway sensation The Producers comes this monster new musical comedy, YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN, based on the Oscar-nominated smash-hit 1974 film. A wickedly inspired re-imagining of the Frankenstein legend based on Mel Brooks' classic comedy masterpiece, the story follows bright young Dr. Frankenstein (that's Fronkensteen) as he attempts to complete his grandfather's masterwork and bring a corpse to life. Together with his oddly shaped and endearing helper Igor (that's Eye-gor), his curvaceous lab assistant Inga, and in spite of his incredibly self-involved madcap fiance, Elizabeth, Frankenstein succeeds in creating a monster - but not without scary and quite often hilarious complications.

With such memorable tunes as "The Transylvania Mania," "He Vas My Boyfriend" and "Puttin' On The Ritz," The New MEL BROOKS Musical YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN is scientifically-proven, monstrously good entertainment...and the only place you'll witness a singing and dancing laboratory experiment in the largest tuxedo ever made. YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN features music and lyrics by the three-time Tony Award winner Mel Brooks, book by Brooks and three-time Tony Award winner Thomas Meehan, and is directed and choreographed by five-time Tony Award winner Susan Stroman. The show stars Roger Bart ("Desperate Housewives"), Megan Mullally ("Will and Grace"),Tony-Award winner Sutton Foster ("Drowsy Chaperone"), SCTV's Andrea Martin and Christopher Fitzgerald ("Wicked").

YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN opens at Broadway's Hilton Theater - Friday, November 9th!

Young Frankenstein Photos

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Customer Reviews: Read 40 more reviews...

1 out of 5 stars

Old, Old...OLD Frankenstein December 28, 2007
14 out of 31 found this review helpful

Wow! The dated dreck currently substituting for a score in the new Broadway non-musical "Young Frankenstein" hits a new low for the theater. This is easily one of the worst scores ever to disgrace a Broadway stage and it's hard to fathom how anyone thought this drivel deserved to see the light of Frankenstein's laboratory. Where to begin? Oh yeah, Mel Brooks. His score for "The Producers" was that show's weakest link but with clever staging and two serious star turns, it was rendered amusing if unmemorable. Still, that juggernaut could not sustain the loss of Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick and was exposed for what it was soon after...light and airy as cotton candy and just as insubstantial. Even that can't be said about this clunker. These trashy and unfunny songs don't produce one memorable moment. Instead, what you get is banal music accompanying some of the most relentlessly offensive lyrics ever to be heard in a professional production. That is, unless you think that Megan Mulally belting out the same crass word about the female anatomy twenty-five times is the height of sophisticated hilarity. The so-called humor would have been DOA forty years ago and sounds like the ramblings of an aging comic like, well, like Brooks. Dated, dated, dated. Most of that "humor", in fact, is lifted en masse from the 1974 movie. It was funny then but lost it's novelty a generation ago. What qualifies as "new" humor (i.e., jokes) on this recording was retro before pen hit paper and you can hear every joke coming a Transylvanian mile away. And just look at the song titles! Many are just the same tired old lines set to music: "Please Don't Touch Me", "Roll in the Hay", "He Vas My Boyfriend"....come on! Not exactly an indication of the creative muse at its peak. How some of Broadway's biggest players got involved with this garbage is unimaginable. Oh, and unlistenable.

The cast might even suffer more than the listener does after being subjected to these humdingers. Sutton Foster, who is becoming a genuine Broadway baby and has been a joy on other recordings, is utterly lost here as Inga and she sounds about as swedish as Julie Andrews. The personality-free Roger Bart is a smarmy and sniveling Frederick, and the very talented Andrea Martin has nothing to play off of. The worst of it goes to Ms. Mulally, who inexplicably interprets Elizabeth like she's a 75 year-old virgin. She also has, uniformly, the worst and slimiest songs in the show. Try getting through "Deep Love" just once and you won't think you can make it. Sorry, you'll have to....it's reprised in the finale (lucky us). Christopher Fitzgerald as Igor only has it better than the rest because the rest have it so bad. Still, these aren't really characters; they're cardboard "types" whose job it is to punch the "punch" lines into the back wall of the Hilton Theatre. Be warned: Duck and Cover.

The show is currently staggering across the Hilton in New York eight times a week. Walk, don't run....to your nearest video store and rent the movie instead. It costs less and is more filling.

4 out of 5 stars

Terrific Follow-up to "The Producers" January 8, 2008
13 out of 17 found this review helpful

Critical reviews of Mel Brook's new musical, "Young Frankenstein", have so far been mixed, but this seems to be somewhat of an expected backlash against Mr. Brooks. His first effort, 2001's "The Producers", was a runaway smash - winning a record number of Tonys and making any follow-up somewhat doomed. While I have yet to see the production (my tickets are for May), I find the score thoroughly enjoyable & a solid sophomore effort.

The amazing cast, led by Roger Bart, Megan Mullally, Sutton Foster, Christopher Fitzgerald, and Andrea Martin, sounds great. The score has a few weak links, but there are several terrific songs. Best tracks:

Please Don't Touch Me
Together Again
Roll In The Hay
Transylvania Mania
Listen To Your Heart
Puttin' On The Ritz (Irving Berlin's standard used in the 1974 film for which the musical is based)
Deep Love

2 out of 5 stars

Falls Monstrously Short January 3, 2008
9 out of 15 found this review helpful

I have to admit that I had a bias against Young Frankenstein. So much of what I had heard about the actions and attitudes of the personnel involved had left a bad taste in my mouth. To wit:

- The obscenely high top ticket price of $450
- The fact that the producers won't make their weekly numbers public
- That Mel Brooks and director/choreographer Susan Stroman toured the house of the Hilton Theater (a la circling vultures) while the poor cast of the late and unlamented show The Pirate Queen were rehearsing on the stage
- That Mel Brooks refuses to join the Writers Guild
- That despite lukewarm out-of-town reviews, the show underwent only cosmetic changes after its Seattle tryout.

The whole thing just smacks of arrogance. The creators are simply assuming that the show will be a smash. They probably figure that after the huge success of The Producers, that they have an automatic hit on their hands with Young Frankenstein. The show is at its best when it veers from slavishly aping the movie. This isn't very often. The creators seem content merely to paste uninspired numbers into what they consider an already-winning formula. It seems to have taken very little effort, and by that I don't so much mean "effortless" as "lazy."

Act 1 is a series of joyless, obligatory production numbers, and comic bits that fall flat. Overall, the score is one step above terrible, redeemed only by the occasional semi-effective number, such as "Deep Love," the Elizabeth character's big second-act showpiece. Most of the lyrics are at best forgettable, at worst awkward and amateurish. Most of the songs are generic placeholders: places where there should be a song, but Brooks hasn't really gone through the effort of thinking through what the song should say, or more important how to make it funny.

The Young Frankenstein score is very similar to that of Spamalot: it doesn't even try to be good. But then, just as with Spamalot, people aren't coming to hear a quality score, and they certainly don't get one. They just want to see one of their favorite movies on stage. Just validate my expectations; don't try to stretch the form or create genuine quality.

The marvelously talented Sutton Foster is simply wasted as the pulchritudinous lab assistant Inga. She doesn't have a single second of stage time that was worthy of her considerable gifts. Christopher Fitzgerald hams it up shamelessly as Igor, often quite effectively, but just as often to silence from the house. Andrea Martin makes the best of the cardboard role of Frau Blucher. Her "He Vas My Boyfriend" was the only number in Act 1 that I found worth applauding.

The biggest disappointment was Megan Mullaley, who seemed with her every breath to be trying to avoid being Karen Walker. The material Brooks has provided her is especially weak, but Mullaley did retain a small remnant of the spark I recall from when she was Rosemary to Matthew Broderick's J. Pierpont Finch in the 1995 revival of How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying.

Young Frankenstein will very likely be a hit, but certainly not because of its characterless score. Will it run for six years, like Mel Brooks' last Broadway effort? I've sort of given up trying to make those kind of predictions. All I can say is that, as far as quality musical theater goes, Young Frankenstein falls monstrously short.

5 out of 5 stars

TRANSYLVANIA MANIA(c) January 3, 2008
8 out of 12 found this review helpful

"Young Frankenstein" is the second Mel Brooks movie musicalized for the broadway stage by Mel Brooks and as such the humor doesn't rise much higher than the level of a precocious dirty-minded schoolboy but dirty-minded schoolboys can be funny and Mr. Brooks is the head of the crass(pun intended). I enjoy low-brow humor so all this is okay with me. If you take the liner notes at face value Mr. Brooks music and lyrics are intended in the style of his heroes Cole Porter and Irving Berlin-not even close-but Mr. Brooks manages some catchy tunes, in fact at times his music is funnier than his lyrics but they both come together like a tasty potluck dinner.

On CD Roger Bart seems to be a mellower Frederick Von Fronkensteen but his singing is fine and Christopher Fitzgerald as Igor, he with the movable hump, comes across so vividly you can almost picture his performance with your minds eye. Sutton Foster-I fell in love after "Thoroughly Modern Millie" and as Inga her "Roll in the Hay" is an invitation I'd gladly accept and her yodeling is so hot it would melt the snow caps of the Alps.

There are two tricky roles that are impossible to compete with, Cloris Leachman forever owns the role of Frau Blucher but Andrea Martin aquits herself quite well and her "He Vas My Boyfriend is a hoot and a half and I admire her ability to keep a straight face singing those nutso lyrics. The second role is that of Elizabeth, Dr Frankensteins ditzy fiance. Madeline Kahn can't be topped and wisely Megan Mullaly doesn't try to but brings her own personality to the role. I must admit I was kinda impressed with her singing on her big 11 o'clock number "Deep Love" despite the fact the double entendres and innuendos were about as subtle as a ton of bricks.

So if you want to dance the new craze "The Transylvania Mania" or are just as happy to be "Puttin' On The Ritz" the Broadway Cast Cd is there to assist you. Enjoy.

3 out of 5 stars

Together Again for the First Time January 3, 2008
8 out of 11 found this review helpful

While far from the fiasco the NY critics claimed it to be, Young Frankenstein is a musical comedy bereft of big laughs. It is however, an entertaining old-fashioned show, albeit one with crude humor. Mel Brooks' score is an affectionaet homage to MGM musicals, Cole Porter and Irving Berlin and Doug Besterman's orchestrations are appropriately sumptuous and "old school". If you enjoy old fashioned scores, you will find a lot here to enjoy.

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