The Review That Shouldn't Be Young Frankenstein, A Precarious Arrangement of Chairs, The Declaration Young Frankenstein Paramount Theatre Through Sept 1. This isn't a review of Young Frankenstein. It's not supposed to be, since Young Frankenstein (adapted from the...

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Is the $20 million stage version of "Young Frankenstein" a monster hit or miss?Most New York critics were decidedly cool to the new Mel Brooks musical that opened Thursday at Broadway's Hilton Theatre, although the show reportedly has a more than $30 million advance that...

In the last six years, Roger Bart has had quite a ride. "The Producers," of course. Movies. Television. Remember George, the psychotic pharmacist on "Desperate Housewives"? And now back to Broadway as the lead in Mel Brooks' stage version of his 1974 film classic, "Young...

I have never been an admirer of Mel Brooks, although I enjoyed Young Frankenstein when it came out a little over a year ago. To be sure, his oeuvre has included some hilarious moments—the "Springtime for Hitler" sequence in The Producers, for example—but these were practically buried beneath an indiscriminate flurry of flat jokes. As Pauline Kael has aptly noted, his films embody the spirit of gagwriting, not screenwriting. They do not work as cinematic comedies because they are ...

Young Frankenstein begins on a dark and stormy night, with the camera panning lovingly over a torchlit courtyard, zooming slowly in to a dusty window, and dissolving as the clock strikes midnight into a caressing inspection of the Gothic inscription on a coffin reposing within a dank and doomladen crypt. A brilliant pastiche of the horror film's studied quest for atmospherics, the sequence suggests not only that Mel Brooks has added some sort of cinematic style to his bag of tricks, but that he knows...

The Frankenstein story, as we all know, is about a creature made up entirely of misappropriate and mismatched parts. That's pretty much the way Mel Brooks has made his new film, Young Frankenstein, too. Since all comedy has to be based on some sort of incongruity, this approach works out pretty well for Brooks. Most of the parts he has misappropriated come out of other people's movies. Besides having stolen the whole idea for this movie from James Whale's Frankenstein (1931), Brooks has...