Theatre review: Young Frankenstein

Mel Brooks' musical adaptation of his own classic film The Producers was a Broadway and West End smash hit, so it was no surprise that the same creative team would try to follow it up. But giving Young Frankenstein the same treatment resulted in an overblown flop, which is why it's taken a decade to cross the Atlantic. But in that time Brooks has continued to work on it, and although I don't have anything to compare it to the version that director/choreographer Susan Stroman has brought to London is, although problematic, hugely entertaining and crowd-pleasing. If one of the criticisms of the 2007 production was that it was too much of a big-budget juggernaut, that's been amended: Although there's a large cast with a vast amount of costume changes (designed by William Ivey Long,) Beowulf Boritt's set tends for a more old-fashioned look with curtain backdrops, and the whole show has a music-hall feel.

Theatre review: Top Hat

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: Technically this doesn't open to London reviewers until next week. It's been on tour since August though, so hopefully they know what they're doing by now.

I should probably also add a disclaimer that this borders on a "not-review" because I've got a cold, and spent this show blowing my nose and feeling like death warmed up. Still, my £16 "restricted view" seat in the very back row of the Grand Circle proved good value with in fact an excellent, if distant, view of the stage - although the three rows ahead of me were empty, so perhaps in normal circumstances people's heads block the view.

A variation on the jukebox musical, there's a trend at the moment for adaptations of musicals by well-known composers - in this case Irving Berlin - with the soundtrack padded out with some of their well-known tunes from other sources. Top Hat was originally an RKO Fred-and-Ginger movie (and the programme notes have a lot of info on the studio's history, focusing especially on staff changes and brushes with bankruptcy, because everyone knows the most glamorous thing about Hollywood is the accounts.)