{"id":40763,"date":"2008-02-29T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2008-02-29T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/reviews\/young-frankenstein\/"},"modified":"2008-02-29T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2008-02-29T00:00:00","slug":"young-frankenstein","status":"publish","type":"review","link":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/reviews\/young-frankenstein\/","title":{"rendered":"Young Frankenstein"},"content":{"rendered":"

Let me make one thing perfectly clear here: Mel Brooks is having too damn much fun in his old age. With the massive success of his adaptation of The Producers<\/i> (12 Tony Awards, over 2000 performances, et cetera), Brooks can get away with pretty much anything he wants; what he wants now is to do a Broadway musical adaptation of his classic film Young Frankenstein<\/i>, which Brooks calls \u201cpretty much the best movie I ever made.\u201d Being a Brooks aficionado, I would agree; Young Frankenstein<\/i> is one of my top five films of all time. But any remake begs the question: how do you top the original\u2019s brilliant performances by Gene Wilder, Marty Feldman, and Teri Garr? How do you improve something that damned good?<\/o:p><\/p>\n

There\u2019s a simple answer: have one of the best traditional musical scores I\u2019ve ever heard.<\/o:p><\/p>\n

Young Frankenstein \u2013 The Musical<\/i> is not Rent<\/i> or Spring Awakening<\/i>. YFTM<\/i> is an old-fashioned, early-to-mid-twentieth-century musical. It has a full orchestra with nary an electric guitar to be heard. The musical numbers all hearken back to various famous musical styles; indeed, the comprehensive liner notes on the CD cheerfully admit the homages Brooks has indulged in. Influences from Danny Kaye\u2019s tongue-twisting song patter and Bob Hope and Bing Crosby\u2019s Road movies to Kurt Weill\u2019s Three-Penny Opera<\/i> pop up with wild abandon, and the cast makes the most of the theatrics. Roger Bart as Viktor von Frankenstein and Sutton Foster as Inge are wonderful, but the real meat is found in the supporting characters. Christopher Fitzgerald\u2019s Igor is creepily funny without resorting to a pale imitation of the late Feldman, Andrea Martin is palpably ominous as Frau Blucher, and Megan Mullaly is absolutely brilliant as von Frankenstein\u2019s crazy, frigid, shallow fianc\u00e9e Elizabeth<\/st1:place><\/st1:city>.<\/o:p><\/p>\n

With the exception of \u201cTransylvania Mania,\u201d which somehow feels tacked on, the songs are all magnificent. Brooks has reinvented himself as a lyricist and composer, and it\u2019s a tour de force; it seems almost unfair that one man is that brilliant. Special note has to be made of \u201cThe Brain,\u201d \u201cJoin The Family Business,\u201d \u201cHe Vas My Boyfriend\u201d (the greatest song about domestic abuse since Tom Lehrer\u2019s \u201cMasochism Tango,\u201d) and \u201cLife, Life.\u201d In fact, if I have any complaint about YFTM<\/i>, it\u2019s that the songs in the first act are so good that the second act pales a bit — though it does include the funny, funny \u201cListen To Your Heart.\u201d<\/o:p><\/p>\n

Mel Brooks once said \u201cGood taste is the enemy of comedy.\u201d While there are some moments in Young Frankenstein \u2013 The Musical<\/i> that this applies to (really, Mel, a song called \u201cDeep Love\u201d? Subtle it ain\u2019t), overall, this is a mature, funny, and well-written musical that is performed admirably. Musical fans shouldn\u2019t miss it.<\/o:p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":29224,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[7274],"rating":[5613],"class_list":["post-40763","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-original-broadway-cast-recording","rating-rating-a-minus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/40763","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40763"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/40763\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29224"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40763"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=40763"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=40763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}