This Day in Theater History (Infamous ‘Frankenstein,’ in One-Night Horror Flop)

January 4, 1981 – This season wasn't the first in which Mary Shelley’s monster showed up on the Great White Way. Twenty-seven years ago, “The Creature” made an appearance every bit as widely anticipated – and, ultimately, disastrous – as it was in the 1818 novel and classic 1931 Boris Karloff film. 

Two years in the making, Frankenstein, written by Victor Gialanella and directed by Tom Moore, played 29 previews at the Palace Theatre, opened, then closed after one night. The play didn’t stint on production values –its lighting and set designs were later nominated for Drama Desk Awards.

But delays and special-effects snafus sent the budget flying from an initial $500,000 up to $2 million – the most expensive non-musical production ever mounted on Broadway to that time. (Nowadays, of course, that would hardly buy the cast and crew coffee.) 

It didn’t help that the actor who played Dr. Victor Frankenstein, David Dukes, had to face an audience after taking over the role during previews after just five days of rehearsals. 

All this strenuous effort went to waste when the crushing reviews poured in, including by the all-important New York Times. Even after the closing notice had been posted, there was a Monday-morning-quarterback attempt to produce a commercial that would raise the monster from the dead, but it was abandoned when sufficient funds couldn’t be raised. 

Yet I wondered, in reviewing the tangled history of this production, if there might not be another reason for this colossal flop. Some of the actors involved had enjoyed or would continue to enjoy notable careers – Dukes, John Glover as Victor’s friend, and John Carradine (the horror movie dependable, here playing the blind hermit). 

And then I stumbled upon the answer: Dianne Wiest, playing Victor’s adopted – ahem! – “cousin.” 

Woody Allen seems to be the only one who has had much luck in coaxing good – yes, even Oscar-worthy – performances (Hannah and Her Sisters, Bullets Over Broadway) from this at-best idiosyncratic actress. Perhaps he’s found in her a kindred spirit who can invest his neurotic roles with just the right tone. 

Other directors have not enjoyed similar luck. During the sad season she played the chief prosecutor on TV’s Law and Order, for instance, she looked like she had just swallowed castor oil – week after week. 

If she was bad then, then imagine my misfortune when I caught her only a year after her role in the Frankenstein debacle, in Othello, sandwiched between two sterling performers – James Earl Jones as the tortured warrior-lover, and Christopher Plummer as an outwardly man-among-men, inwardly seething Iago. 

Later I would see better Desdemonas – a young and luminous Maggie Smith in the 1965 Laurence Olivier film, a heartbreaking Lucy Peacock at the Stratford Theatre Festival in Canada in 1994, and an exotic Irene Jacob on film, opposite Laurence Fishburne and Kenneth Branagh, a year later. 

But in 1982, I had to listen to Wiest unleashing, in wavering tones, “My lo-o-o-r-r-d.” Her childlike, simpering attitude led me Columbia friend Alan to conclude, with infinite justice if not mercy, “She should have been smothered by the end of the first act.” 

So that explained the problem with the first Frankenstein. It wasn’t runaway budgets. Dianne Wiest had given the production the cooties. Talking about ill-starred “bullets over Broadway”! 

From what I’ve heard, Mel Brooks’ new show is riding the good will generated by its predecessor, The Producers. But at least he doesn’t have Wiest to give the show the kiss of death.