Young Frankenstein.

Is there life after The Producers, even after the DOA bomb of the film of the stage play? At this reckoning, there is at least $25 million of it, given the reported pre-sale of tickets to Young Frankenstein, the Broadway adaptation of the 1974 Mel Brooks film which opens tonight at the Hilton Theater.

"Opens" is something of a formality. The musical has been "previewing" some time now to packed houses. I don't have attendance figures, so I can't report with precision on how many more people have already seen Young Frankenstein onstage (for more than $100, sometimes a lot more) than paid to see the 2006 version of The Producers on the screen. (Note that Susan Stroman, who directed the film that tanked so famously, is the director of this stage production, as she was for The Producers onstage.)

Updated through 11/14.

As with the 1974 Brooks original (an adapatation and spoof of Frankensetein, The Bride of Frankenstein, and every other cliché of the first generation of monster pictures in the talking-film era), this is a story about bringing life into a dead body. The revival about the revival of Dr Frankenstein's original process is also a romantic comedy about a young man's pilgrimage to Transyvania to shed his sex-averse fiancee and find love - through sex, of course.

Was it worth another shot? The bottom line already suggests that it was.

And Brooks (co-writing with Thomas Meehan) has made it a whole lot of it, and even better, if you like leering burlesque shows with every gag in the book - and who doesn't? Almost all of the original film is still there in the script, plus long bawdy elaborate musical numbers that take you back to the Marx Brothers of the 30s (with raunchy updates of what was innuendo in those days) - and to the 60s of Get Smart, the TV spy-spoof that Brooks created, with Don Adams as the schlemiel version of Robert Vaughn in The Man from UNCLE. Could Get Smart be the next Mel Brooks musical?

The stage sets for Young Frankenstein draw, like the script, from the screen original. Casting is one of the musical's strengths, mostly because no one in the cast lets real acting get in the way of a laugh. Roger Bart is innocent and driven as the young brain surgeon who is determined to get beyond his family's legacy. As his fiancee, Elizabeth, who spurns every overture for sex, Megan Mullally parades through an encyclopedia of recyscled Jewish princess jokes. Christopher Fitzgerald, as Igor (Eye-gor in Brooks's script, just as the young doctor insists that his name be pronounced Franken-STEEN), is as funny a twist on the character as wide-eyed Marty Feldman's was back in 1974. The same can be said of Andrea Martin, who plays the love-lorn house-keeper Frau Blucher (whom Cloris Leachman played in the original). In Brooks's stage version, she is the old Dr Frankenstein's former lover, still longing for the mad scientist, which gives her the chance to do a Marlene Dietrich lament with the dirge, "He Was My Boyfriend."

The songs let Brooks go over the top here. He turns the monster's famous stumbling walk with arms outstretched into a dance, the "Transylvania Mania," spoofing "Beware of the Blob" numbers from the 1950s, and "It's Me," which Elizabeth belts out when she arrives unexpectedly in Transylvania (catching her husband en flagrant delit), must have been inspired by decades of work with self-absorbed actresses.

There is nothing in Young Frankenstein that will scare you, except the ticket prices. (There are now "business class" seats for the show, selling officially at $450. Bear in mind that it was The Producers that proved that show's producers that they could get away with charging that high.) Young Frankenstein isn't even as scary as the under-appreciated Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), which led the way for this kind of parody. For fright, you'll have to try Hostel: The Musical (Roger Bart could play the same sex-tourist role that he played in Hostel 2), which doesn't sound so brazen as a show about a flop called Springtime for Hitler. Don't hold your breath.

But Young Frankenstein is not just a parody of horror movies. It's a ride through the cliches of cinematic romantic comedy, with an ocean liner, evening clothes, a quixotic young genius with a blonde assistant who has an accent and a huge voice (Sutton Foster), and a runaway fiancee who finds fulfilment when she's ravished by a monster. Rather than try to make new romantiic comedies by tinkering with cookbooks from the 1930s and 1940s, Brooks is just mocking them with crazy entries and exits and music-hall bawdiness. (See Tom Stoppard's 1985 play, Rough Crossing, for an earlier stab at that approach.)

Since you won't get a ticket to the play for some time - at least not for anything resembling a reasonable price - go back to the 1974 film. Gene Wilder, always a great nebbish (and with a comb-over that rivals Donald Trump's), brings a whine to the role that we don't hear onstage, and Cloris Leachman finds her inner hissing Transylvanian, who just seems to sound a lot like Marlene Dietrich. I had forgotten that Teri Garr was the sexy assistant, Inge [Good Lord, I hadn't - ed.]. Peter Boyle is a dead-pan comic monster. Close-ups make it a different kind of comedy than the broad burlesque onstage. Watching the film again, you see that Brooks's humor is based largely on stage gags. More often than not, his sequences are filmed theater. And why not? This is a guy who grew up on vaudeville.

Sitting there for three hours in the theater, I couldn't help but think of our own Frankenstein's monster, Dick Cheney, a man of sinister bald mien and chronically weak heart, who disappears for days (or more), only to emerge from "the dark side" of an undisclosed location, revitalized, to perform for sympathetic audiences who are expected to cough up a lot more than the extortionate Broadway ticket prices. Running Halliburton may be too stressful for Cheney after Bush's second term ends, what with all the inveestigations into profiteering and sweetheart deals. But when you're looking for a new career, there's always entertainment. Can we look for him as the monster in the film that's inevitably going to come after the Young Frankenstein play?

-David D'Arcy

Paul Mazursky and a few of Brooks's friends from "the third floor at Fox in the 70s" caught the preview in Seattle. He writes in Salon: "We told Mel how much we loved the show. We advised him to cut a few minutes. He nodded in agreement. 'I told you. I gotta fix some stuff.' But he was relieved and so were we. Then Mel suddenly turned dark. 'I know you guys think I'm on top of the world. But right now I feel like an empty shell. I wish Annie could be here with us.' Tears came to his eyes, and to mine. We all commiserated, but we all knew it couldn't do much good. 'I love you guys,' Mel said."

Update, 11/9: "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," writes Ben Brantley in the New York Times.

"Well, the sparks surely fly in Young Frankenstein's oversized 30s-horror-film stage laboratory," writes Paul Kolnik in Time. "But the show, which opened Thursday night at Broadway's Hilton Theatre, is missing much of the electricity that made The Producers such a monster hit. What went wrong? A few theories."

Update, 11/12: "With its slack plot and its inflated production numbers, the show transforms a tale of romantic agony into a theatrical agony," writes John Lahr in the New Yorker.

Update, 11/14: "Mel Brooks is the Norman Mailer of comedy, a pugnacious little guy who comes out swinging," writes John Heilpern in the New York Observer. "He's written several enduring classics that changed the landscape; he's unembarrassed to fail; he fires scattershot; and when he misses the target - boy, does he ever. Young Frankenstein misses."

Posted by dwhudson at November 8, 2007 2:18 PM