So much lightning. So many furrowed brows.

I have been anticipating seeing Off-Broadway’s Frankenstein, the Musical, currently in an open-ended run at 37 Arts, since the second post on Man In Chair last July. Despite not being crazy about the concept CD, and having to sift through the painfully caustic reviews, I have still been rooting for the show and went in tonight with an open mind.

My first misgivings came when those of us who were assigned seats in the mezzanine were all ushered down to the orchestra section because there were so few patrons there. Good for us, not a good sign for the show.

The set was about as sleek and high tech as it could get, consisting mostly of silver metallic staircases and platforms, at which six cajillion lighting instruments pointed from every angle. At the top of the largest staircase was a screen upon which various images were projected throughout the evening either to set a mood, to indicate a change of setting, or in the coolest effect, to create the illusion that the staircase extended even further than it did.

Further upstage were two sliding screens through which characters entered, exited or were lit dramatically from every possible angle. It felt as though this might be a rehearsal space for Justin Timberlake’s latest concert venue.

According to the show’s official website, the creators’ intention was to offer a “bold new experience for modern theatre audiences.”

“To do so, they have broken with many of the conventions of musical theater to re-imagine the classic allegory as a ‘memory play’ in which time and space are fluid, and in which people and places come instantly alive in the mind of the story’s protagonist, Victor Frankenstein–and vanish just as quickly.”

While I am all for boldness, convention-breaking and risk-taking in the theatre, the “fluidity of time and space” in this Frankenstein ultimately results in a lot of unspecific wandering about the stage, and general singing out to the audience, scowling in pools of severe downlighting.

Aaron Serotsky set the melodramatic tone immediately as pseudo narrator, Capt. Robert Walton, explaining the relationships of Victor Frankenstein (Hunter Foster) and his various family and friends, in a breathy singsong delivery reminiscent of Tobias from Sweeney Todd. We know immediately we are in for a high stakes evening.

The first third of the show is focused primarily on Victor Frankenstein’s (Hunter Foster) rise from a prodigious young student of science to a scholar obsessed with the regeneration of dead tissue to the point that he completely alienates his family and childhood sweetheart (Christiane Noll). Mr. Foster has a fantastic voice, and I’m sure the association of his name with the show has helped to keep it afloat, but he is entirely miscast in this role.

With his baby face and youthful frame I’m afraid I just didn’t buy him as the workaholic doctor who has spent a lifetime obsessed with his science. The point is driven home in the final moments of the show when Foster sings to The Creature as a father singing to his son. It’s a tender moment, but just too hard to buy the father/son analogy given Foster’s youthful appearance.

Though partly the fault of Mark Baron’s amped up pop-rock score, I found Foster’s performance to be running in one of two gears for much of the show. He was either in grimacing, scowling, maniacal high gear, or he was singing a tender pop-ballad. Mostly the former, and with very little middle ground.

Christiane Noll also has a beautiful voice, and was also trapped by the “fluidity” of this storytelling, often facing straight out to the house, supposedly singing to her friend/lover/husband, Victor, who was usually somewhere on the other side of the stage in his own pool of downlighting. One of the few times the two actors connected physically during “The Workings of the Heart,” was actually quite moving. Would it had happened more.

Many improvements have been made musically since the concept CD was recorded. Much of the pop rock score is quite exciting to listen to, though it becomes repetitive fairly quickly. Around the fifth electric guitar riff into the first act, that rock concert scenario began to enter my mind again as the show began to feel less like a theatre piece telling a coherent story, and more like a rock concert version based loosely on Shelley’s novel, not unlike the recent British re-imagining of Rent seems to have turned out.

Just as I was tossing around this new way to view the piece, The Creature (Steve Blanchard) appears for the first time, and my new vision becomes even more clear. Mr. Blanchard and the creators of Frankenstein have made some very bold choices in creating the character of Dr. Frankenstein’s Creature. I applaud them for making those bold choices and committing to them fully. Unfortunately, they don’t work more often than they do.

Our first hint of The Creature’s physicality is through his distorted shadow, suggesting a certain Elephant Man-like deformity, in line with the style of the show so far. When the actor appears on stage, however, he seems to have stepped out of of a completely different reality. He wears an artfully tattered coat over his bare, buff torso, and tight pants that look like designer denim. His musical numbers portray a man tortured by his own existence, and their style, paired with Blanchard’s delivery reinforces the rock concert feel even more. Again, the actor has a great voice, but everything about the character took me out of the show I had been watching.

He makes bold physical choices for The Creature–a tic of the head, a crippled arm, a lurching gait that conveys the difficulty required to move his body in its intended direction. He periodically bursts into fits of pounding on his legs and arms, giving the sense of a man whose is physically and mentally tortured merely by inhabiting his own body.

Often it’s way over the top, but I give the actor credit for fearlessly committing to the choices he and director, Bill Fennelly have made. When it comes down to it, I’d rather watch actors take risks and occasionally fail than skate their way through a safe, uninspired carnival like this show’s uptown cousin.

Some of the music in the second act breaks out of the sameness of the first act. As I mentioned before “The Workings of the Heart” lets us finally see a physical and emotional connection between the good doctor and his wife, and “The Coming of the Dawn” is a showstopper, though it’s the second song from the end of the musical, and for this audience member, the show had stopped long before it.

In the program notes, there is an interesting tidbit saying that “Frankenstein” is an entry in every major dictionary of the English language, and is generally employed to mean “an agency or creation that slips from the control of, and ultimately destroys, its creator.”

Although I’m certain that the creators of this musical began with sincere intentions to create an homage to Mary Shelley’s classic novel, I’m afraid that the temptation to overproduce and over conceptualize their creation may have slipped from their control, and ultimately destroyed them.

Related Articles:

• Better Off Dead
• Walkin' the Line at Frankenstein
• Theatre Geek TV: More Frankenstein
• Broadway Hottie: Steve Blanchard
• Theatre Geek TV: Frankenstein
• What I Learned from Musical Theatre V
• Frankenstein: The Musical Update
• Frankenstein the Musical

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