At the end of a year in which female-forward and feminist theatre has made so much progress, The Boy Friend looks regressive as well as nostalgic. On the other hand, it is a colourful and escapist retreat from the winter, and we could all do with a night off from angst.
‘Surpassed every expectation’: THE PRODUCERS – Manchester ★★★★★
The Christmas musical at the Royal Exchange is fast becoming a Manchester tradition. After a run of hits, The Producers has a lot to live up to, but even so, it surpasses every expectation. Raz Shaw’s production of this classic and controversial Mel Brooks musical turns the camp, the glitter and the hilarity up to 11.
INTERVIEW: Shuler Hensley – An outstanding actor who brings humanity to dysfunctionality’
Shuler Hensley is an American actor who, outside of the theatre world and especially the musical theatre world, is little known in the UK. Currently, he can be found in the Theatre Royal Bath’s Ustinov Studio in the modern tragedy The Whale,
‘Hilariously brilliant night at the theatre’: YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN – West End ★★★★
This show is funny beyond belief and a real joy to watch. If it’s a feel-good show you want, then Young Frankenstein is the one for you.
‘Lovers of the original movie will be thrilled’: YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN – West End
A decade after the mega-budget follow-up to The Producers flopped on Broadway, Mel Brooks is back with a scaled down Young Frankenstein, this time on London’s West End. The sets may be smaller, but the laughs are just as big.
YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN – West End ★★★★★
It might be too early for pantomime, but it’s never too soon to see Mel Brooks’ ingenious updating of Young Frankenstein delivered as a spoof both of the horror movie genre and of the theatricality of stage musicals.
What do revivals of Hair & Five Guys Named Moe have in common?
Terri Paddock rounds up three musicals she’s seen recently: Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein in the West End, Five Guys Named Moe in the specially erected Marble Arch Theatre and the 50th-anniversary revival of Hair at The Vaults.
What do revivals of Hair & Five Guys Named Moe have in common?
Terri Paddock rounds up three musicals she’s seen recently: Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein in the West End, Five Guys Named Moe in the specially erected Marble Arch Theatre and the 50th-anniversary revival of Hair at The Vaults.
YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN – West End ★★★★
Like The Producers before it, Young Frankenstein hails from a Brooks movie of some 40 years earlier with the veteran writer/director reframing the comedy-horror flick around his own composition of words and music.
YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN – West End ★★★★
This cult movie-cum-musical is a smash hit with those who don’t take themselves too seriously – and who appreciate that same quality in musical theatre. Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein is outrageously funny and devilishly naughty.
YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN – Garrick Theatre ❤❤❤❤❤
Mad and bizarrely brilliant, this musical based on the classic 1974 film is a great way to cure the blues. If there is a more madly brilliant show than Young Frankenstein in the West End then I have yet to see it.
YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN – West End ★★★★
A TRANSYLVANIAN TRANSPORT OF DELIGHT Sometimes you just want a bit of fun. That is the moment to turn to Mel Brooks, master of daft parody. At 91, the master strode onstage tonight with director Susan Stroman, and … Continue reading →
HOT TICKETS: 7 shows to see opening in September, from Ink to Young Frankenstein
Summer’s officially over, but don’t be sad – there’s plenty of great theatre to keep you happy. Love London Love Culture’s Emma Clarendon has rounded up the productions she’s most looking forward to in September. With Mates ticket links!
NEWS: Hadley Fraser & Ross Noble lead Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein
Ross Noble, Lesley Joseph and Hadley Fraser will lead the cast of Mel Brooks’ YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN – the classic comedy musical based on the Oscar-nominated smash hit movie.
NEWS: Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein opens at West End’s Garrick Theatre in September
Mel Brooks’ YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN – the new comedy musical based on the Oscar-nominated smash hit movie – will open in the West End on Thursday 28 September 2017 at the Garrick Theatre
What were our Top 10 news stories in October 2016?
As it’s the first of the month, we’re taking a brief moment to remind ourselves of the biggest news stories from the month just closed. What were the headlines that got readers clicking most? Any surprises? Our Top 10 News stories from October 2016 are listed below with summaries and links to read more.
NEWS: Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein due for West End after Newcastle in 2017
Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein – which will open for a pre West End season at the Newcastle Theatre Royal (26 August to 9 September 2017) – is slated for a West End opening autumn 2017. Exact dates and venue to be confirmed.
ON BROADWAY: Something Rotten!
We meet the Bottom Brothers (Rob McClure and Josh Grisetti), two playwrights continually frustrated with living in Shakespeare’s shadow. Nick Bottom is desperate, just for once, to trump the Bard at writing…
THE PRODUCERS – Touring
Ah, The Producers. Probably our favourite of the glut of movies turned musicals of the past decade or so. The original production was a wonder of un-PC satire that was far and away the best thing Mel Brooks had turned his hand to in years. More than ten years later and the show is well established in the canon of musicals that head out regularly on tour. Has familiarity dulled the humour of the piece?
Bad Jews – Review
Arts Theatre, London
**
Written by Joshua HarmonDirected by Michael Longhurst
Ilan Goodman and Jenna Augen
Acclaimed at Bath last year and sold out at London’s St James Theatre in January, Bad Jews now makes the short hop across town to the Arts Theatre to meet an almost insatiable demand to see the show. Indeed the clamour for tickets has been so strong that it led comedienne Ruby Wax to tweet recently of Bad Jews’ “mostly Jewish audience. If you insult them, they will come”.
The play is provocatively titled because as Harmon admits in the programme, eleven years ago and before a plot had even evolved, he thought it would be “a good title for a play”. Hmm. A dodgy premise for any creative work. Substance needs to come before the packaging and ultimately Bad Jews makes for mediocre drama.
Three Jewish cousins (plus Melody the Christian girlfriend of one cousin) are gathered in New York for the funeral of grandfather Poppy, a Holocaust survivor. Amidst familiar and familial spats of jealousy, rivalry and momentary affection, the plot’s action focusses upon a Jewish necklace (a Chai) that Poppy had kept concealed during his time in the camps.
Religiously committed granddaughter Daphna believes the Chai should rightfully be hers whilst assimilated cousin Liam (who via some family chicanery, already possesses the necklace) is on the cusp of proposing to Melody and plans to give her the Chai in place of a traditional engagement ring. Daphna’s nauseated fury at Liam’s plan is understandable. However where Harmon abuses our disbelief, whose suspension is already hanging by a thread, is in asking us to accept the conceit that WASP Melody would even prefer the battered Chai over a diamond solitaire. It makes for an in-credible pivotal plot-line.
To be fair, Harmon does thread some strands of relevance into his work. His exposition of the vain and arrogant self-belief of Daphna’s piety is spot-on and he offers a further morsel of intellectual meat to chew on as he references the impact of assimilation and “marrying out” upon Judaism’s cultural heritage. Noble arguments and credit too for his attempt to address the impact of the Holocaust upon third generation survivors. But ultimately it’s all packaged up in a bundle of writing that far too often makes for a tedious naivety. Where Arthur Miller once brought a scalpel-like precision to such complex studies of humanity, Harmon wields mallet and chisel and it shows.
Speaking to The Guardian recently Harmon tells of how just before the play opened in Bath, that he had cut a line from the text that referred to the safety in being Jewish today, recognising that the sentiment didn’t accurately reflect the current experience of European Jews. Whilst the edit was necessary, actually the chopped words should never have been written in the first place. For most of the last millennium continental Europe has been a deadly place for Jews – and that’s both before and after Hitler – and Harmon’s failure to acknowledge that continuum, even as he wrote Bad Jews, evidences a worrying ignorance.
And that side-splitting comedy? The programme notes reference Mel Brooks’ The Producers in which Brooks brilliantly lampooned Hitler in his 1968 farce and subsequent musical. However, that The Producers worked at all was because Brooks craftily mocked an evil regime. Here, by contrast, Bad Jews’ audience rather than laughing at the Nazis, are invited to guffaw at a surviving family’s struggles to cope with the Holocaust’s devastating legacy. There’s a whiff of freak-show here and it leaves a nasty taste.
Further credit to some of the performers. Ilan Goodman’s Liam is a focussed channelled force, who notwithstanding the ridiculously Fawlty-esque extremes imposed upon his character, makes us believe in his comfortably assimilated Jewish identity, as well as his love for Melody. Playing his love interest, Gina Bramhill is a strawberry blonde genteel gentile. It’s a novel twist that sees the non-Jew sketched out as a caricatured stereotype, but again and to her credit, Bramhill makes fabulous work of some occasionally ghastly dialogue. That Jenna Augen’s Daphna, almost a year into the play’s run, speaks too often in a squeaky gabble is mind boggling.
Completing the quartet, Joe Coen’s Jonah is the Beavis-type silent one, who too little too late offers an endgame revelation that deserves more analysis from Harmon than the (yet another) sensational moment it is given.
In his song Shikse Goddess, taken from The Last Five Years, Broadway composer Jason Robert Brown, nails the complex and awkward nuances of assimilation with witty yet profound analysis in four minutes. Harmon takes more than an hour and a half to clumsily cover much of the same ground. Somewhere in Bad Jews there could be a good play struggling to emerge. This ain’t it.
Runs to 30th May 2015
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