What if Mary Shelly’s gothic horror classic Frankenstein was resurrected as a campy one-man musical? An interesting premise explored by LampHouse Theatre in their new show playing at Pleasance, Frankenstein (On A Budget). The show follows the success of the company’s work last year - War Of The Worlds (on a budget). Its high energy performance is led by Tom Fox who is really putting his all into this. Unfortunately, 'his all' is heavily reliant on awkward audience interaction and bad puns.
Zany, Monty Python style comedy
Many of the musical numbers were funny and exciting, however many felt dragged and failed to bring in new ideas to the show, at times feeling like we were hearing the same song over and over again. The opening number was excellent and really felt as though we were about to see something special. However, by the end, this zany Monty Python style comedy comes to a complete halt when the show ends very oddly with a seemingly sincere song delivering a moral message about enjoying life, ukulele and all. Things had already gone significantly downhill before that ending though.
Although the concept of the show is being ‘on a budget’, it is unclear exactly how much of a budget that was. Some of the props were made to look intentionally bad as though perhaps a toddler had designed them, this could be a very funny visual joke, however it was inconsistent as others were well-made and clearly took a fair bit of resources to put together.
While Fox is undeniably charismatic, his character's running joke of being overly arrogant and dismissive of the ‘stage manager / tech / narrator’ character just made him come across as unlikeable in this production, even if the two did make up with each other by the end. Some parts of audience participation were very fun, however criticising individual audience members for not laughing and making regular asides about how the show “doesn't get any better from here” made it challenging to fully get behind. I could imagine this show really working in another context if they were to lean even harder into the limited budget (without leaning harder into the idea that somehow a limited budget makes the jokes worse) and perhaps placing it within the free fringe setting to complement this. After the success of their previous work, the overall experience taken away from this was disappointing.
