“It’s Pronounced ‘Fronkensteen’”

Young Frankenstein: The Musical

at the Academy Theatre

A Review

Leave it to Mel Brooks to turn a classic horror movie into something funny.

Young Frankenstein: The Musical, currently at Meadville’s Academy Theatre, demonstrates that lightning can strike twice. Another former Brooks’ film, The Producers, hit the boards in 2001 and was a phenomenal hit, so why not try it again?

Written for the stage by Brooks and collaborator, Thomas Meehan, Young Frankenstein is a pastiche of two prior sources: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (Duh!) and the seminal 1931 film Frankenstein starring Boris Karloff, (Double Duh!) from which all later Frankenstein movies are assessed.

Directed by Almitra Clerkin, this two-act musical contains close to 30 songs that carry the story. First, we meet Dr. Frederick Frankenstein (Duncan Prather) an instructor at a New York medical academy and grandson of the infamous doctor who first re-created life. Leaving his fiance’ Elizabeth Benning (Racheal Graybill) behind, he travels to Transylvania to receive an inheritance where he meets Igor (Jason Sakal), his hunchbacked soon-to-be go-fer.

Thinking ahead, Igor finds the doctor a lovely lab assistant (Olivia Kane) and is greeted at Castle Frankenstein by Frau Blucher (Linda Kemp) (Cue horses whinnying!). Young Frankenstein soon falls under the spell of his ancestor’s medical journals and is convinced he can reverse the family’s tarnished name”if only he can re-create life from yet another corpse. Enter the Monster (Chris Pedersen).

Led by the vengeful lawman Inspector Kemp (Richard Kress) who was maimed by the original monster as a boy, he whips the townsfolk into a frenzy of paranoia”but is it too late?

Musical highlights include Graybill’s Please Don’t Touch Me, Kemp’s He Vas My Boyfriend, and Kane’s Roll in the Hay. While Brooks wrote the music and lyrics, he did borrow Irving Berlin’s Puttin’ on the Ritz, the show’s showstopper as performed by Prather and Pedersen, respectively.

Okay, so what’s next from the Mel Brooks’ movie catalog to turn into a musical? Spaceballs? High Anxiety?

How about Silent Movie? Now that’s a musical I’d to see!

Or hear!

See you in the balcony! XOXO

***Thea Tah

Young Frankenstein: The Musical runs through October 22. For more information, visit www.TheAcademyTheatre.org

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