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 previews—unless 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&M–flavored Frau Blücher (played
by Tony Award–winner 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 stop—looks 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 encounters—between humans and humans, humans
and animals, humans and fruits, humans and furniture—happen is
Seattle. Each situation has its independent node of meaning, and each
node is part of a network of activity—a 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 things—a 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 hilarious—especially with an extra
droll Speaker of the House (Nick Edwards) and a calmly bitchy John
Hancock (Conor McNassar).
The bumbling Congress—with their drinking, vote swapping, and
making out in the broom closet—takes 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
