Mel Brooks- Young Frankenstein.

Mel Brooks- Young Frankenstein.

Oh yes! What a performance! Has the West End ever seen anything quite like this? Probably but not for some time now. The land of the West End musical has always been proud of its diversity, ranging pleasingly from the sublime to the ridiculous. And we mustn't forget those classical show stoppers, the ones that leave you tingling all over because you knew what you were going to get. This was one evening when the West End pulled out all of the stops once again.

Mel Brooks Young Frankenstein is one of the craziest, zaniest, silliest and daftest shows in the West End at the moment. To call it a musical would be doing it a grave injustice because quite clearly this had nothing to do with anything in particular. It just happened in front of a packed and elated Garrick Theatre. Not for the first time a Mel Brooks production hit all of the right and relevant buttons and by the end of the evening had ticked all of the most apt of comedy-cum musical boxes.

Brooks last rib tickling, hilariously brilliant box office hit The Producers, caricaturing beautifully the murderously vile Adolf Hitler and all of his evil henchmen, will always be remembered with the fondest memories by everybody. Now though Brooks took us on another glorious journey down memory lane with the stage interpretation of the great Gene Wilder film where Young Frankenstein provided us with some of the most outrageously and spectacularly funny of all West End shows.

Even in his late 80s Brooks still succeeds in nailing the most perfect of all literary subjects by mocking and totally exaggerating one of the ugliest characters in classic literature. Young Frankenstein is perhaps the scariest and most grotesque novel ever written by Mary Shelley. And here at the Garrick Theatre, Young Frankenstein contrived to leave most of its audience belly laughing, clapping over and over again and just abandoning itself to sheer unadulterated joy.

Set in deepest Transylvania, Young Frankenstein is the simple story of Frederick Frankenstein, quite the nuttiest and most ludicrous of all creations, a man with a white coat who spends most of his time mixing and matching his potions and medicines to create the Monster. Hadley Fraser is a brilliantly stupid scientist who does everything he possibly can to produce the ultimate in grotesquerie. Fraser is outstanding as the bonkers scientist who just can't get it right. But then you had to admire his persistence.

Surrounded by Fred Frankenstein, there were a whole circus of weird characters who were just made in heaven. Throughout Young Frankenstein we are treated most generously to a performance that reduces most of the Garrick to almost helpless and convulsive laughter, as the entire cast set about goofing around the stage in various states of madness and dottiness. Here were all the absurdities and superbly comic manifestations you're ever likely to see in one show.

Russ Noble, one of Britain's funniest and cleverest stand up comedians, here makes the seamless transition to the West End stage with a truly magnificent performance that is both comically exquisite and delightfully stupid. Noble is Igor, the black cloaked village idiot who shambles around the Garrick stage rather like the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Noble, a Geordie comic genius, is just breathtakingly superlative as some bizarrely strange and gothic character who looked as though he may have stepped out of some haunted castle in the middle of the night.

But it's Mel Brooks who should really take an enormous amount of credit for yet another polished Brooks masterpiece. In Blazing Saddles, Brooks gave us a delicious glimpse of his unchallengeable genius and we were not to be disappointed again. Young Frankenstein was gorgeously hilarious and heart warmingly good for the soul. Here once again was the West End theatreland in all its most dazzling colours, a fusion of richly incessant humour and a rich vein of comedy. All in all this was a thoroughly entertaining evening that will live long in the memory.

Leslie Joseph, playing a superlatively pompous character called Frau Blucher, almost beggared description as a completely oddball figure whose German accent and eccentric antics left some of us in deeply questioning mood. What on earth was Joseph supposed to be doing or saying and it simply mattered not a jot  because hers was the kind of comic character whose natural talent would have graced any West End show? The sexy, saucy and vampish Frau Blucher memorably broke into one particularly double entendre song that had the Garrick splitting their sides with floods of laughter. It was naughty, vulgar and full of the seaside end of pier, Kenneth Williams innuendo that would have had them rolling in their aisles in Carry On company. Joseph's days as the snobbish and pretentious Dorian in Birds of Feather must have seemed a distant albeit shining memory.

And then there was our central character of the evening, a figure so utterly amusing and downright green that it was compulsively watchable. Shuler Hensley was the Monster, a dark green ogre who took full advantage of that weirdly disturbing face with a perfect depiction of Herman Munster's cousin. Of course this is patently untrue but at times the resemblance to Munster must have been uncanny. In another astonishingly unforgettable scene the Monster launches into a glitzy, glittering version of Putting on The Ritz, a Fred Astaire classic that seemed totally out of place but stupendously laughable all the same.

Dianne Pilkington's performance as the kittenish, powerfully feminine Elizabeth Benning brought the house down. Benning pouted and preened temptingly and teasingly with the rest of the cast as if sex were the only thing on her mind. Her rival for the affections with Summer Strallen Inga was a performance pitched to comic perfection. In one never to be forgotten moment the whole cast seemed to be carried along on the crest of a very suggestive wave as one very sultry woman throws her body about on a horse and carriage with the funniest and most provocative of West End showtime acts.

Finally and last but not least Patrick Clancy as Inspector Kemp seemed to bring the whole of the police force into disrepute cruelly mocking the dutiful detective whose intentions were nothing but honourable. Clancy was a supremely happy go lucky American cop who proudly boasted the death of the Young Frankenstein but then gasped for breath when the soppy but lovable scientist came back to life.

So it was that my wife and father- in- law came out of the Garrick Theatre tremendously uplifted and exhilarated by Young Frankenstein. Outside the theatre a Japanese rickshaw took early evening Friday revellers around the fountains of  Trafalgar Square and all was well with the world. Once again the abundantly fertile imagination of Mel Brooks had done it again. Once again it had been a privilege to be in the land of the West End showbiz fraternity where escapism from the outside world had been more than enough. Shortly we'll be celebrating the charming virtues of the pantomime season. Oh yes we will.