Young Frankenstein review – glorious gags as Mel Brooks bolts together a monster hit

Garrick theatre, London
The horror-movie spoof is gleefully reanimated for the stage with even more jokes, superb set-pieces and barnstorming parody songs that stick a pitchfork into good taste

Mel Brooks recently predicted how London critics would react to this musical version of his 1974 horror-movie spoof: “They’ll say it’s good but it’s not as great as The Producers.” Well for this critic it’s every bit as good as, if not better than, its predecessor in that it piles on the gags even more relentlessly and wittily parodies musicals past and present. It offers an evening of gloriously impure fun.

The book, by Brooks himself and the late Thomas Meehan, sticks closely to the format of the movie. Frederick Frankenstein is an American professor of neurology lured back to Transylvania to sell off his grandfather’s rambling Gothic pile. Once he arrives, several things tempt him to stay. One is the brio of his yodelling assistant, Inga, who in the course of a wagon-ride to the castle reveals a remarkable capacity to fork hay (“I’m a very hard forker,” she announces). Even more tempting is the prospect of repeating his grandfather’s experiment of reanimating dead tissue and implanting a new brain in the body of a giant corpse. Thus is the Monster reborn.

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from The Guardian http://ift.tt/2xwW17Q