Frank talk

All around the village known as the Broadway community, a resentful mob is preparing its torches for Young Frankenstein. The villagers are angry. The villagers feel threatened. The villagers want to see the monster dance, yes, but then they want to see it die.

Mel Brooks’s follow-up to 2001’s The Producers—which, like a bolt of lightning, revivified the abandoned corpse of musical comedy—is indisputably one of the year’s hot tickets, but the heat is not all friendly. The top price range of $375 to $450, applied to more than 200 of the best seats in the Hilton Theatre, is unprecedented for a show that has not even opened yet; and the musical’s refusal to release its weekly box-office take has been greeted with deep suspicion. Many of the same theater folks who eagerly welcomed The Producers now see Young Frankenstein as a lumbering intruder, untroubled by the possible destruction in its wake.

The most common justification for the upward sprint of Broadway pricing in general holds that the money reaped from hit shows goes back into the system. Most shows close at a loss; producers use their windfalls from the few big hits to finance other theatrical ventures. But this rationale doesn’t quite apply to Young Frankenstein. It has only two producers—Brooks himself and the ultrarich media mogul Robert F.X. Sillerman—who can boast only a single other previous Broadway producing credit between them: The Producers.

Yet if the rising tide will lift no boats but those in Brooks’s harbor, its waves may be far-reaching. Scalpers have long charged exorbitantly for popular shows, but Young Frankenstein’s pricing sets a new official standard by which future pricing can be judged—and judged leniently. (Suddenly, $300 looks reasonable by comparison.) And Brooks and Sillerman’s grabbiness can only hinder efforts to limit the skyrocketing cost of mounting a show. (As of press time, the stagehands’ union is threatening to strike if its financial demands are not met, using premium seats as evidence of exploitation. “Producers constantly lament that most shows lose money, but Broadway is hugely profitable,” union spokesman Bruce Cohen tells TONY. “We have tickets as high as $450.”)

In the long run, ticket inflation of the kind systematized by Young Frankenstein threatens to push Broadway away from ordinary New Yorkers and toward the only audiences who can pay its way: tourists splurging for a onetime theater experience, and business-world fat cats to whom expense accounts are no object. It strikes many folks as ironic that our Mr. Brooks—whose comedic image is that of the little guy mouthing off to the powers that be—should have a hand in this sad trend. Shed no tears for the corporate pigeons getting squeezed for $450. But light a candle, if not a torch, for the kind of theater that might get squeezed out.

They paid the price

Michael Platt, $800 per ticket

“My wife, kids and I watch everything Mel Brooks has ever done, and we’ll continue to do that until the day we die. I bought ten tickets. We’re bringing my brother and sister-in-law, all four of my kids, my daughter-in-law—unfortunately my grandson isn’t 1 yet, but next year we’ll bring him. Once you’ve gone to a Broadway show and sat close up, you can’t enjoy it the same way unless you sit really close up again, so you just gotta bite the bullet and get great seats—it’s worth it. I paid $800 a seat for ten seats, through a broker, so it was either that or pay for my son’s bar mitzvah. Just kidding—he had a bar mitzvah.”

Walter Niejadlik, $370 per ticket

“It’s just a blockbuster kind of show that you don’t see every day. As for being able to afford it, my advice is, make rich friends. I’d try the [ticket] lottery—I know they have a lottery here. I know you can get the tickets a little cheaper, or wait until they go out and start offering discounts. But I definitely felt like I got my money’s worth.”

Greg Gregory, $350 per ticket

“I paid so much for this show, because it’s the hot show right now on Broadway, and I loved the movie. Mel Brooks is an iconic producer who’s fantastic, and I just assumed that this’d be the show that I would want to go to when I was up here for a couple of days on the weekend. But I’m selling them now because I accidentally bought shows for the evening when I knew that I wanted matinee tickets. I bought $1,400 worth of Young Frankenstein tickets. You guys want a couple extra? I’ll give you a great deal!”—Sam Tremble