Mel Brooks is singing into the telephone. "He vas a bully und a brute, he vas as crazy as a coot," the comic half-growls, impersonating an elderly Transylvanian housekeeper. "Still, I didn't give a hoot - he vas my boyfriend."
The fabled filmmaker/Broadway producer is 83 and still has most of his factory-issued parts, so it's not surprising that the pipes occasionally show a speck or two of rust. Besides, Brooks was giving this impromptu concert strictly for educational purposes, to illustrate a point about the musical stage version of "Young Frankenstein." A national tour containing much of the original Broadway cast (including "Desperate Housewives" alumnus Roger Bart) runs through Jan. 24 at the Hippodrome Theatre.
"The second child is always shunned," he says of the critical pans received by the New York production. (Some reviewers find the musical to be overly similar to the 1974 film.) "I think it's the best score I've ever written. It's twice as good as 'The Producers.' If I'd done 'Young Frankenstein' first, I would have gotten the 12 Tonys for that. But it had to follow 'The Producers.' "
Not that Brooks is dissing his maiden stage effort, the show containing the immortal number "Springtime for Hitler," the show holding the record for the most Tony Awards ever won by a stage musical. Praise the subversive intelligence behind "The Producers," and Brooks becomes so instantly joyful that the telephone receiver practically glows.
"Whether my characters are cavemen or sophisticates, my stories are always about the human condition," he says. "I just talk about how people behave. The whole ballgame is ideas - how they're couched in language, and how they're performed."
He loves every one of his artistic children passionately and indiscriminately, and will tell you that each of his 11 movies is his favorite, ranking such relative unknowns as "Life Stinks" alongside "Blazing Saddles." Ditto for his two stage musicals and the television shows he created, which include both the iconic ("Get Smart") and the quickly forgotten ("When Things Were Rotten.")
"Look, I made a movie called 'The Twelve Chairs' that sold three tickets maybe, and then I made a movie called 'Young Frankenstein' that sold 3 million tickets," he says. "I tell you, it has absolutely nothing to do with quality or merit. 'The Twelve Chairs' is just as good a movie as 'Young Frankenstein.' I'll send you the box set. You watch it sometime, and you call me back and tell me if I'm right."
