Broadway's Young Frankenstein to Close on January 4, 2009
by Broadway.com Staff • Nov 23, 2008
Young Frankenstein, which won five 2008 Broadway.com Audience Awards including Favorite New Broadway Musical, will play its final performance at the HIlton Theatre on January 4, 2009. The musical comedy based on the hit film will have played 30 preview and 484 regular performances at the time of closing. Lead producer Robert F.X. Sillerman announced plans to launch a national tour of the show in September 2009.
Based on the Oscar-nominated 1974 film, Young Frankenstein is Mel Brooks' comic re-imagining of the Mary Shelley classic. When Frederick Frankenstein, an esteemed New York brain surgeon and professor, inherits a castle and laboratory in Transylvania from his grandfather, deranged genius Victor Von Frankenstein, he faces a dilemma. Does he continue to run from his family's tortured past or does he stay in Transylvania to carry on his grandfather's mad experiments reanimating the dead and, in the process, fall in love with his sexy lab assistant Inga? Unfolding in the forbidding Castle Frankenstein and the foggy moors of Transylvania Heights, the show's raucous score includes "The Transylvania Mania," "He Vas My Boyfriend" and Irving Berlin's "Puttin' On the Ritz."
Directed and choreographed by Tony winner Susan Stroman, Young Frankenstein features a book by three-time Tony Award winner Mel Brooks and three-time Tony Award winner Thomas Meehan and music and lyrics by Brooks.
In addition to favorite musical, Young Frankenstein won Broadway.com Audience Awards in the categories of Favorite Leading Actor Roger Bart, Favorite Featured Actress Megan Mullally, Favorite Featured Actor Christopher Fitzgerald and Favorite Onstage Pair shared by Bart and Sutton Foster.
Young Frankenstein currently stars Roger Bart as Dr. Frederick Frankenstein, Fred Applegate as Kemp, Cory English as Igor, Shuler Hensley as the Monster, Beth Leavel as Frau Blucher, Michele Ragusa as Elizabeth and Kelly Sullivan as Inga.