A couple of monsters, and Louis Armstrong right in the middle of ‘em
Ryan Stajmiger, Andrew MacNaughton, Sean Fortunato, Isabella Andrews, and Mary Robin Roth. Photo by Liza Lauren.
The “lightning doesn’t strike twice” jokes wrote themselves when Young Frankenstein lurched onto Broadway in 2007. It had the same creative team as the all-out smash hit The Producers: Mel Brooks writing songs to complement a filling-out of his film script, with Thomas Meehan assisting on book, same director / choreographer, same design team. But the budget was bigger, the theater was bigger—the biggest on the Rialto, actually—the ticket prices out of the gate were astronomical. Blame it on overly high expectations from the public, or say the critics were baited by the sheer cheek of it all, but that monster was brought to heel pretty quickly.
About ten years later, Brooks and company put the musical back on the slab and took it for a spin in England. There, it enjoyed a much more gleeful reception, and that version has since become one of those musicals that companies do, at once and without apology, when the talent is properly aligned. Well, director L. Walter Stearns aligned the talent at Mercury, and just in time for Halloween. And that big green lug might just be worth some of your green.
So what’s changed? Scale is the big one. The would-be mega-musical can now comfortably fit in a music hall, and Mercury’s hall is as intimate as any. It’s apt, too—Young Frankenstein the film is not so much plotted as it is a vehicle for sketch comedy, so Young Frankenstein the musical is really less of a book musical and more like vaudeville, a two-hour parade of variety and shtick mixing dark stormy nights and Shelley with rolls in the hay and schwanzstuckers. Lots and lots of schwanzstuckers.
What’s stayed the same? Though the physical production is smaller-scaled, the Mel Brooks spirit still encourages flinging it with all one’s might to the back of the stalls. If the film was tongue-in-cheek, the musical sticks its tongue right out. Even Sean Fortunato as our nominal straight man Frederick Frankenstein, an eminent brain surgeon loathe to discuss his grandfather’s infamous experiments, begins to crack as that irrepressible family mania begins to pump through his veins upon returning to his ancestral homeland.
I couldn’t help but wonder if it was possible to calibrate the performances toward something droller, something less insistent, something that could really send up old-timey po-faced horror melodrama. You get something like that in Lillian Castillo’s Elizabeth, whose primness barely hides the jazz baby within. (She played the house like a Stradivarius on press night, in a medical boot, yet. Here’s to her fast recovery.) Likewise, Jonah B. Winston’s Inspector Kemp is an operetta-worthy bürgermeister self-seriously unaware of his stiffness (and not because of the prosthetics). Or, hell, even Andrew McNaughton’s Monster, a babe in the woods with an angry mob on his heels.
But, then again, if you dialed anything back, would we have anything quite like Ryan Stajmiger’s kohled-up hunchback Igor? Or Mary Robin Roth’s forbidding-’till-T.M.I. Frau Blücher?
Mel Brooks’s maximalist spirit might just irresistible. Lightning doesn’t have to strike twice for it to jolt someone to life.
And, yes, spoilers ahead:
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Irving Berlin’s “Puttin’ on the Ritz” makes it in. It’s a hoot. (Choreography by Brenda Didier.)
Young Frankenstein runs through Dec. 31 at Mercury Theater Chicago, 3745 N. Southport Ave. For tickets or more information, please call (773) 360-7365 or visit mercurytheaterchicago.com.
James Monroe Iglehart. Photo by Jeremy Daniel.
Following a run in New Orleans and its run here in Chicago, A Wonderful World, taking its lead from its subject Louis Armstrong, will head next to Los Angeles. Whether it will make the final leg of the journey—to New York to settle down for a nice long time—remains to be seen.
In the lead, James Monroe Iglehart certainly delivers that old Pops charm, and one hopes he’s doing what he can to preserve his voice, singing and speaking like Louis for two-plus hours perhaps being one of the least enviable assignments. And, as our other enticer, we have Khalifa White, Jennie Harney-Fleming, Brennyn Lark, and Ta’rea Campbell playing his wives—one per city—to the hilt. To my knowledge, a spouse-centric narrative hasn’t been tried in one of these songbook musicals (or their more nebulous cousin, the musicals based on “the songs that made the artist famous”, which is what World is). Songbook-musical spouses are not known for their longevity: two minutes’ stage time worth of marital bliss, then two minutes of “I’m not playing mistress to your music” or some such parting shot.
Iglehart and that quartet throw off plenty of heat, just as they do justice to that songbook of veritable chestnuts. (Michael O. Mitchell and Anastasia Victory give them an attractive and cohesive gloss.) It looks great, it certainly moves well.
The rest is bullet points, though, sadly the usual order for these kinds of shows. “Then the stock market crashed,” as Harney-Fleming as matter-of-fact Wife Number Two Lil Hardin intones. That’s about the measure of half of Aurin Squire’s book.
The other half, to be fair, has plenty of interesting ideas, particularly as regards juxtaposition, perhaps to make those feel-good songs feel like something else. “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love” pops up with every wife, each time in a different arrangement. “Avalon” underpins Armstrong’s steamboat-riding days as he gets the starch out of Dixieland’s collar and plays something hotter. A sinister take on “Up a Lazy River” immediately after informs his reasons why, as a Black man, it might be best to head north. And for show-stopping, we have a late-showing tap sensation in Lincoln Perry, a.k.a Stepin Fetchit (DeWitt Fleming, Jr.) giving Louis some pointers on getting through Hollywood and life with “Smile and the World Smiles With You”. What many called obsequiousness on Louis’s part—that endless plugged-in grin of his—he called survival. And he could unplug it any damn time he wanted; in response to the Little Rock Nine fracas, he makes it clear that he doesn’t like Ike.
The smile and the irascibility—both powered Louis Armstrong through fifty-some years in the public eye. That might be a little too much time to distill into one show, though, even through the filter of his love life. This band may need to really dig through their suitcases while out there on the road to see what’s worth keeping and what’s worth leaving behind.
A Wonderful World runs through Oct. 29 at Cadillac Palace Theatre, 151 W. Randolph St.. For tickets or more information, please call (800) 775-2000 or visit either broadwayinchicago.com or louisarmstrongmusical.com.
Finally, not a review, per se, but…
About a year ago, singer-songwriter Shayfer James, among others, opened for Will Wood at Lincoln Hall. One of his songs was “Pile of Bones”, from a musical adaptation of Beowulf he was piecing together with actress-singer-songwriter Kate Douglas. They called it The Ninth Hour, a phrase connoting the time of triumph over evil.
All due respect to Wood and the other artists that night, but I don’t remember much of anything expect “Pile of Bones”—creepy, weighty, yet also somehow breezy as any bop. I was hooked.
I figured any relative stranger to musical theatre who was willing to submit to the glorious nightmare of putting one of these monsters together is someone to watch.
Though James and Douglas have since put out an album of their work to date—James “obviously” sings Grendel and Douglas sings Beowulf—they’re still piecing it together in a sort of tour / peripatetic workshop, befitting the bardic nature of this olde English tale. They landed for a one-night stay at the Den Theatre, where it was apparent their labors were already bearing fruit, or at least a healthily bubbling cult fandom.
In a time when phrases like “intellectual property” seem to suck the marrow from the act of creation, theater artists are finding something reviving in the eternal verities of ancient myth. To name but a few, there’s Anaïs Mitchell’s Dust Bowl-cum-Nawlins Hadestown and Jorge Rivera-Herran’s in-progress EPIC, a Hamilton-meets-Skyrim take on The Iliad and The Odyssey. The Ninth Hour seems to claim as its territory the same pounding and salty crags as that Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. Even now, the idea of giving the villainous Grendel a mother—someone who will mourn his defeat at the hands of the titular warrior—seems controversial. (Jerica Exum filled in for Mom quite thrillingly.) But wait—is Grendel the villain? That old dichotomy plays out, just as the big fight scene, scored with the song “Punish You”, toys with the coin that has violence on one side and sex on the other.
And while touring has its own logistical issues, I very much like this idea of workshopping. It keeps the work in progress alive, which beats the one-shot-is-all-you-get model.
So, yes, I’m pulling for them.
Even though this tour is wrapping, a turbulent seashore like the one Friedrich painted, like the one James and Douglas whipped up, won’t freeze over in the coming winter. There’s no better time for these two to plunge on in to their work.
For more information on The Ninth Hour, including any updates on future engagements, please visit ninthhourmusical.com. More on either artist may be found at shayferjames.com or kate-douglas.com.
For more reviews on this or other shows, please visit theatreinchicago.com.