Tom Conti isn’t the only actor I’ve seen this week returning to a role he has played before – but at least in the case of veteran actor Warren Mitchell, who I saw yesterday in Visiting Mr Green, a play that he first visited in 1999 at West Yorkshire Playhouse and has since played in Australia, he’s honest about his reasons for doing so: “You get to a certain age, in my case 81, and it’s not so easy to learn lines any more, so as I’ve played the part it isn’t such a struggle.”
Nor, in the case of Mel Brooks, who is also 81, is it so easy to come up with new lines, either, hence re-visiting another of his films, Young Frankenstein, for his stage sequel to the runaway success of The Producers that finally opened on Broadway last night.
Some of the gags, “many of which are lifted from the movie, are pretty funny. (OK, let’s be honest: I laughed exactly three times)”, reports Ben Brantley in his New York Times review this morning.
But if most of the reviews today suggest that Brooks has been defeated twice over by competing with himself again, both in relation to The Producers onstage (which actually improved on that film for many) and the original film incarnation of Young Frankenstein, there’s another strand that’s inevitably surfacing, too: the hubris of a series of commercial calculations that have undermined both the integrity of the show itself and the goodwill that might otherwise have been extended to it.
As David Rooney itemises them in his Variety review, the “first black mark came with the early decision — after committing to play former Producers home the St. James Theater — to move the show into the considerably larger and little-loved Hilton. Next was the announcement of $450 premium seats (most folks might have waited for hit status before introducing such a lofty ducat). Then came the refusal to reveal grosses, the reporting of which is standard industry practice.” He goes on, “A curtain-call lyric heralds a possible Blazing Saddles tuner next year, which seems a premature declaration from the creative team that this show is a smash and the public will be hollering for more. Maybe they’ll be right. Maybe not. Either way, the insider animosity adds a further sour taste to what’s likely to be fairly general disappointment in a once eagerly anticipated show.”
In The Producers, of course, Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom inadvertently created a hit show with Springtime for Hitler when they fully intended to produce a monster flop, and and pondered aloud, “Where did we go right?” Now the opposite question is looming over Young Frankenstein, and many critics are offering possible answers. In USA Today, Robert Bianco suggests, “For some fans, the mere chance to watch those stars re-create the film’s high points may be enough, but you can’t help feeling that underneath all the bloat is a more modest and likeable musical comedy. Modest shows, however, seldom become the kind of big hits that command big ticket prices, and big is clearly the goal here. No, Brooks and company didn’t create that monster. They just made Young Frankenstein its victim.”
In Variety, David Rooney also suggests, “Fans of the movie who know each scene by heart can be heard laughing and applauding the setups for the jokes, making the payoff almost redundant. That factor hasn’t hurt Monty Python’s Spamalot. But if musical-makers are going to continue to mine movies as source material for anything beyond theme-park jollies, reinvention, not just reproduction, has to figure in the formula.”
