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 1974 Mel Brooks movie, now in a pre-Broadway test production at the Paramount) has been in previews for two weeks and will only be officially open and subject to reviews for one week, starting August 23.
It must be said: This preview situation is tilted toward obscurantism. Reviewers aren't allowed to write about it for most of the run, so people have to guess whether they want to spend $25 or $100 or $0 on their tickets. The producers' argument is: This is a work in progress, we're changing things as we go, it's not fair to review that. That's fine, except ticket buyers aren't told they're paying for previewsâunless they look very carefully, they don't know they're paying for a "work in progress." That's disingenuous.
The press may not have access to previews, but my credit card does, so it bought a ticket and brought me as its date. We sat next to a silver-haired couple who'd driven up from Olympia. They didn't know anything about the show, of course, but came because "we got a deal when we bought tickets to Spamalot."
Most everybody else had come to reminisce about the movie. You could hear it in their laughter, which was less reactionary than preemptive: Oh ho ho, they're about to put on the Ritz!
The audience was also volubly appreciative of Megan Mullally (of Will & Grace, here playing Dr. Frankenstein's fiancée and singing the hell out of "Deep Love," her homage to the monster's cock) and Roger Bart (of The Producers and Hostel: Part II, here playing Dr. Frankenstein with a passable imitation of Gene Wilder's scream delivery).
Also audibly appreciated: "Join the Family Business," an exuberant dance with the ghosts of Dr. Frankenstein's ancestors whirling around in little cyclones of lab coat and beard. The audience hollered for "He Vas My Boyfriend," a paean to pain and abusive relationships sung by the dour and vaguely S&Mâflavored Frau BlĂŒcher (played by Tony Awardâwinner Andrea Martin).
Cheers for an extended, if uninspired, version of "Puttin' on the Ritz" were more perfunctory. Laughter for a cloying joke about espresso was merely polite. The sets were expensive, the musical didn't stray far from its source material, and most of the songs were forgettable. The most exciting moments were a few almost-falls among the dancers.
And it's three hours long. The PR lady says it's "two and a half hours long with a 15-minute intermission." But I was there; it was at least three hours. Sometimes it felt like eight. Children squirmed. Adults yawned. I feared for my neighbors, who were driving back to Olympia that night. If something happened to them on the way home, I'm blaming the previews. BRENDAN KILEY
A Precarious Arrangement of Chairs
Live Girls! Theatre
Through Aug 25.
Three or so years ago, Sonia Dawkins, the director of modern dance at Pacific Northwest Ballet, staged an unnamed work of urban situations. The music was a lively nu-jazz beat by St. Germain and the location was a bus stopâlooks were exchanged between the dancers, something started to happen, and, just before reaching its full expression or meaning, vanished.
The accidental situationism of Dawkins's piece can also be found in Jaime Roberts's A Precarious Arrangement of Chairs, which a lazy press release describes as a "play about life, furniture, and the necessity of vitamin C." This description is not accurate; Chairs is not a play. Instead, it occupies a curious space somewhere between a play and a dance performance.
Chairs is an hour of movement, gestures, and phrases connected by situations (happenings) rather than a story. The city in which these chance encountersâbetween humans and humans, humans and animals, humans and fruits, humans and furnitureâhappen is Seattle. Each situation has its independent node of meaning, and each node is part of a network of activityâa mother, with her leashed son, visiting a zoo; passengers on a bus breaking into "My Girl"; a comic repetition of a family's dinner conversations. Chairs is funny and pleasing as a whole because it avoids profundity. Like Dawkins, Roberts stays on the surface of thingsâa happening is a happening. A bad version of this performance would have taken itself too seriously and tried to bring all the parts together into one mass of meaning. The mind behind Chairs knows that words, thoughts, and encounters in an urban space can only be precious if they are delicate, if they are precarious. CHARLES MUDEDE
The Declaration
Wing-It Productions at Historic University Theater
Through Sept 21.
Dressing up in powdered wigs and colonial coats is funny, but specifically spoofing the Second Continental Congress (the group that adopted the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia in 1776 and ran the Revolutionary War) is hilariousâespecially with an extra droll Speaker of the House (Nick Edwards) and a calmly bitchy John Hancock (Conor McNassar).
The bumbling Congressâwith their drinking, vote swapping, and making out in the broom closetâtakes up legislation based on suggestions from the audience who stand in for aggrieved colonists. The night I watched, Hancock, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Charles Thompson (the unknown secretary at the Congress) debated seat-belt laws, corsets, and baseball. In the second act, the cast picked an audience member to play King George and had to take up his punishing reactionary edicts from across the Atlantic, such as outlawing the words "such as," which made some great who's-on-first gymnastics.
Director Andrew McMasters has some highfalutin aspirations, explaining that the comedy is intended to show how Americans threw off tyranny in the past and that "we can make it happen in the future." While Bush sucks and all, the show stands on its own as a brainy send-up, like a student skit at Harvard or Yale circa 1927 when witty young history-club students would dial in something as (sad to say) arcane as tea jokes and the signing of the Declaration of Independence. JOSH FEIT
