新科學怪人 Young Frankenstein (同場加映)

Young Frankenstein review
I think this was just about the best comedy musical I’ve ever seen. I could feel a connection to pretty much all the characters! The character development was great, so I could feel that each of the main characters had good points and flaws as well, and I could come to love all of them!  The cast in this particular rendition of the musical was spectacular, especially the monster and the doctor, but my main praise goes to the writer Mel Brooks for creating something so delightful for me to watch.

I loved all the set changes!  I’m a big fan of set changes and this musical had quite a lot of them.  Transylvania, Johns Hopkins Anatomy Department, boarding a ship called the Mary Shelley, a hayride, and of course Dr. Frankenstein’s secret underground laboratory.  The sets were not really complex sets with lots of props, but rather sets with a medium level of complexity and many backdrops and curtains painted to look like Transylvania (for example).  There were so many delightful little details, like the way horses would make a sound only when the housekeeper’s name was mentioned, the way one of the brains was dropped and accidentally got squished, leading to the speech problems of the monster later, and the way the monster’s and doctor’s roles were reversed in an amusing way towards the end of the show.

The theater itself was very well run.  Unlike that disastrous management of the entry to Hamilton I had to experience a few months ago, the entry here was smooth just like it ought to be.  We arrived about 20 minutes before the show, picked up our tickets in the window, bought a program for five quid and were in our seats within five minutes.  Brilliant.  There was a bar just around the corner and I had a pint of beer before coming to the theater for a matinee so I was properly prepared for the show! 

And the girl who played the doctor’s lover, the German fraulein who was a “hard worker”/”haat fawker” (haha) was so cute!

Ok, so basically the whole show was awesome.  If you want to see a comedy in London, this is the one to see.  This show made me laugh and simultaneously forget all the problems of myself.  I loved it.