Pardon Me, Boy, Is This the Transylvania Station?

We escaped from Long Beach yesterday evening for some fun in LA, beginning with an early dinner at Home in Los Feliz. And it turned out to be a nice evening for it: sitting outside on the patio, enjoying a chicken pomodoro sandwich with sweet potato fries and sampling some of Caesar's chicken curry sandwich (which was delicious). I didn't particularly enjoy the gaggle of gays talking loudly about how many bowls they'd smoked the night before or bragging about which TV show they were going to loiter in the background of be on in the near future. I could feel my eyes rolling to the back of my head whenever one of them would cackle.

After dinner, we headed to Wacko just to check out all the neat little trinkets and doodads and gizmos they had in stock. And I walked away with a little Shake-A-Tongue figure called Slow Speed who now sits next to my tikis on the office desk. (Yet another collectible I don't really need, but what they hey?)

From Wacko, we drove to the Pantages for the main event of Sunday night: Young Frankenstein.

Too make a long story short, this musical follows much of Mel Brooks' classic comedy Young Frankenstein: Frederick Frankenstein travels from New York to Transylvania to clean up some loose ends at his Grandfather Victor's castle. He finds the infamous lab and discovers that the rumors about his uncle's attempts to bring dead tissue to life were true, and embarks on his own quest to complete his Grandfather's work.

And hilarity ensues.

Or tries to, anyway.

I didn't find the first act as funny as most in the audience did. Much of the jokes seemed forced; sometimes they hit the mark, other times, they missed by quite a bit. Sitting in the audience, I felt as though I were sitting in the audience of a show rather than getting caught up in the story. But the second act, where they re-enacted the Hermit's cottage and the "Puttin' on the Ritz" scenes, had me laughing out loud. The songs weren't all that memorable -- with the exception of Puttin' on the Ritz from Irving Berlin.

The dancing, however, from the Transylvania Mania to the shadow play of Puttin' on the Ritz, was incredible and ingenious. And all the actors were phenomenal: Shuler Hensley as The Creature, Joanna Glushak as Frau Blucher, Anne Horak as Inga, Cory English as Igor and Roger Bart as Frederick Frankenstein. (He played the part with a wonderfully subtle yet deranged touch.)

I'm glad to have seen it, if only to say that I was able to see Roger Bart perform. But I doubt that I would want to see it again.