mind the monster

The Short Version
We saw the Broadway-bound musical Young Frankenstein Saturday night. It was great. See it if you get the chance.

The Long Version
Four days after our return from New York and were still pretty exhausted.
We had seen two Broadway shows in New York and I thought we were done with our Musical Quota for a while. I think our past average is no more than one every other year. But we’d been hearing incredible things about “The New Mel Brooks Musical Young Frankenstein” (that’s the whole title, really), and it was closing and moving to Broadway the weekend after we got back. So we hopped on line and got tickets to the very last show before it closed – Saturday, September 1.

The show was great. The more I see the big productions, the more amazed I am with the creativity people have in how to use the stage. I still remember a little something about creative use of the scenery from when I was a kid. We had season tickets to SALOC (Southern Arizona Light Opera Company), but I don’t remember too much about their shows. What I remember is from The Gaslight Theatre, a melodrama theater (the kind of place where you boo at the bad guys and cheer for the good ones) that we loved to go to.

There was a western show they did, and there was a chase scene on a train. The Hero was on the train car on our left, towards the end of the train, and the Villain was on the car on the right, towards the engine (you only saw those two cars). The villain pulled the pin between the cars, and they started to separate. The Hero (the new Sheriff in town, I believe) grabbed the front car and hung on. And on, and on. And his arm kept growing longer as the cars separated. There was a slinky, and a lot of extra fabric, up his sleeve! (And then came the fabulous line about “the long arm of the law!” and wild applause from the audience.)

Young Frankenstein had a lot of those great moments where the cast and the stage worked together to really hit the high notes.

A lot of the show actually had me thinking about The Gaslight. Just really big, With a really big budget. The set was amazing, and the cast surely got paid a heck of a lot more than the Gaslight folks – it starred folks like Megan Mullally (from Will & Grace) and other big names.

We watched the movie yesterday (I’m sure I had seen it before, as a kid, but I didn’t really remember much of it at all). I have to say the musical is a lot better. Maybe the movie would have seemed better in a theater, with a big audience to fill in the laughs. But in our family room, even with a big screen TV, it didn’t pack too much of a punch. And there were some parts that were, word for word, the same. But in the play the goofy stuff was played bigger, the songs were GREAT, and there was just a little more magic.

But if you can’t make it to New York to see the show on Broadway, I recommend a trip down to Broadway and Kolb in Tucson and check out whatever is playing at The Gaslight. (If you want more of a touch of The Monster wait until September and October of next year, when they’ll be performing Frankenstein Lives! –or– The Jolt’s on You!)