Forget Iran for a while. Let's talk about more serious matters. ABC has announced that sometime this Fall, they will air a live performance of what is sometimes still advertised as "The New Mel Brooks Musical," Young Frankenstein. Let us consider some obvious questions…
First, who's going to be in it? The folks who'll make that decision may not know yet but when I heard about this, the first name that popped into my mind was Martin Short as Dr. Frankenstein…though come to think of it, he wouldn't be a bad Igor, either. Maybe they'll want someone younger and better known to the youthful audience for the bigger role. I'm guessing Cloris Leachman at age 93 is not up to playing the role she played in the movie but didn't play on stage as Frau Blücher (horse whinny) but wouldn't that be neat?
Legend, which may not be untrue, has it that she auditioned to recreate the role in the musical but Mel turned her down as too old. She was 81 then. She went on to appear on Dancing with the Stars and that convinced Mel she was not too old and they were in talks to have her join the Broadway production but it closed before that could happen.
If Cloris is out of the running, how about Andrea Martin, who won great acclaim for playing it in the original production? How about a lot of the folks who were in the original production? None of them were what was wrong with that show. Which bring us to the question: Which version of the show are they going to do?
The Broadway version opened in November of 2007 and ran until January 4, 2009 for a total of 30 previews and 484 performances. How the show fared financially is unknown because its producers, breaking with theatrical tradition, declined to release information on its weekly grosses and other relevant info, but it's widely assumed they were disappointed. They'd clearly expected to best The Producers, which ran 2,502 performances and won twelve Tony awards. Young Frankenstein got three nominations and won zero.
In August of 2017 — ten years after it hit Broadway — the show debuted in England in a somewhat-changed version. Brooks and his co-author Thomas Meehan had made many changes to the book and dropped several songs and added several new ones. One of those dropped was "Join the Family Business," which I thought was easily the best number in the show.
The Broadway version is apparently the one performed anywhere else these days when a new production is mounted. It's what was performed when Amber and I saw a local staging in October of '17. Will the ABC telecast use the original script, the rewrite seen in Great Britain, or will it be an amalgam? And what are they going to do about certain words in either script that one usually does not say on network television? We shall see.