Young Frankenstein Gets Class Treatment — Undeservedly
Photo: Valley Wind Productions
The problem with the Orpheus Musical Theatre Society’s current winter offering, Young Frankenstein, is that it’s not worth doing.
Devotees of Mel Brooks’ patented brand of low-grade comedy may still want to embrace it, given that it’s a musical version of one of his most popular movies and honours the Brooks tradition of luxuriating in its own bad taste. And let’s face it, there are some on this planet who continue to hail Mel Brooks as some kind of comic genius. It’s also true that his freewheeling lack of inhibition can sometimes disarm an audience as efficiently as a dose of salts: for an example, one need go no further than his first real screen success, the western spoof, Blazing Saddles, and the notorious baked-bean sequence around the campfire and the ensuing discharge — in stereophonic sound no less — of collective cowboy flatulence.