Search - Mark Baron, Stephen Purdy, Aaron Serotsky :: Frankenstein: A New Musical

Great performers with not so great material

Jon Kowing | Kansas City, MO USA | 09/05/2008

(2 out of 5 stars)

"I saw this show last fall during the stagehands' strike on Broadway. I so wanted to like this show. It seemed like a poor Off-Broadway underdog playing at the same time the big Broadway show Mel Brook's Young Frankenstein premiered. I'd been attracted by the amazing credentials and voices of the performers involved. This show is in what I'd call the Les Miz-style. Mostly sung, with the story hurtling forward with hardly a chance for a breath. And everything is so very, very earnest. You're made to feel a little guilty for just wanting a good, suspenseful, eerie monster story. Maybe with a little tragic romance. Instead it takes itself so very serious with its important issues of God and man and creation and, well, I just couldn't care because ultimately I didn't really care about any of the characters moving around an extremely uninteresting set with it's PowerPoint projections that told us where we were in what year. And it often seemed that everything truly dramatic and suspenseful happened off stage or behind a scrim.



Oh. And the music. The music didn't make me care too much about the characters either. Every "song" seemed more or less like the one preceding it. Except they didn't really seem so much like songs -- you could never really feel the shape of any tunes to grab onto, or that allowed any of the performers to shape into something enjoyable. I was so thankful when Hunter Foster finally got to sing "The Coming of the Dawn" almost at the very end. It was really the first time I felt he was able to just sing something that felt like a song and not just directionless declamatory drama. Amazingly, it seemed to be a real song. A nice power ballad that had a melody that stuck with me. It was the only thing that made a favorable impression on me. Well, I did buy a nice t-shirt in the lobby. I liked it. Still have it. It fits me well.



Check Frankenstein out for yourself though. If you enjoyed Les Miserables and some of the other attempts a bringing these old or gothic tales to musical theater (Jane Eyre, Lestat, Jekyll & Hyde and Phantom of the Opera come to mind) then you might find something to like in this."

Unique and Dark Music

Kitty Jackson | USA | 10/25/2009

(5 out of 5 stars)

"My sister bought me this musical mistaking it for Young Frankenstein. I decided to give it a listen and I'm so glad I did. This has become one of my personal favourite musicals of all time and I listen to it so much. The songs are gorgeous and so lovely to listen to. The voices are top notch and the acting through the songs if superb. I definitely recommend this musical to anyone who is a fellow theater love."