ONE OF MY favourite cartoons appeared in The New Yorker: a scruffy man stands in a phone booth speaking to an unseen victim: “Hello — is this Miss Johnston, the kindergarten teacher? This is an obscene call: NUMBER ONE! NUMBER TWO! KAKA-PEE PEE!”
Those witty lines came back to me countless times while watching the preview of The New Mel Brooks Musical Young Frankenstein, to use its entire, unwieldy title.
Is it funny? Several times. Is it crude? Cruder than the Alberta tar sands. And though it is enjoyable in spots,the pleasure lasts about as long as cotton candy, and it is just as nourishing. But its level of humour is truly at the level of a five-year-old, or maybe an immature 10-year-old, captured well in an early song in which a man sings of his life, pauses, and cries out “BUT…” which immediately and inevitably is followed by him patting his rear end. (But/Butt — get it?)
Mel Brooks has never been the thinking-man’s comedian, although at his best, he penned inspired sketches for the great Your Show of Shows starring Sid Caesar. And The Producers, both the film and the musical (directed by Susan Stroman, as is this show), was some of Mel Brooks’s finest work.
But watching Young Frankenstein brought to this critic’s mind an interview he gave decades ago: “As a kid,my idea of sex was ‘if it moves,fondle it!’”Funny, but infantile, like three-quarters of the laughs in this show. If you take children, they’ll miss all the very funny parodies of 1930s horror movies in the handsome sets and (one hopes) the vulgar references to the monster’s large organ but may be charmed by the sexist, dated “dumb blonde” jokes, and attractive, buxom women dancing about in irrelevant garter belts.
Is Young Frankenstein worth seeing? If you enjoy Mel Brooks, as I do, you’ll find some things to laugh over. And if you have the sexual maturity and attitudes of a preadolescent, it’s a perfect evening. Young Frankenstein runs until April 18 at the Princess of Wales theatre.
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