Back on the Horse: Mel Brooks Penning Songs for Blazing Saddles Musical

By Kenneth Jones
16 Mar 2010

Mel Brooks
Mel Brooks
Photo by Aubrey Reuben

At the end of Mel Brooks' Broadway musical Young Frankenstein, the cast asked, in song, if a stage version of Brooks' hit film "Blazing Saddles" might be also be in the wings. After all, Brooks had already also made a hit stage musical out of his film, "The Producers."

Three's a charm? Brooks is already two songs into Blazing Saddles, the musical, he told the Canadian Press. He's writing a third new number.

The 1974 film comedy spoofs the Hollywood Western genre as it tells of a black sheriff (played by Cleavon Little) in an Old West town. The epithet-packed picture has intolerance and racism on its mind, but is mostly interested in taking absurd comic potshots at the form — and Hollywood icons. Madeline Kahn, for example, played a Marlene Dietrich-style saloon performer (a la "Destry Rides Again") named Lili Von Shtup, who sang a laconic song about sex, "I'm Tired."

The picture also includes a title song (complete with cracking whip) and a (literally) fourth-wall-breaking number, "The French Mistake."

The Tony Award-winning 83-year-old composer-lyricist-librettist told The Canadian Press that if the show materializes, "I wouldn't rush to New York with it because the [New York] Times would say: 'Oh dear, oh dear, another movie converted and transmogrified into a musical.' The Times was only lukewarm to Young Frankenstein, but you know, everybody else was hot — some of the greatest reviews I ever got."

Brooks said it could be completely written within the next year. No production plan or creative team has been announced for the still-gestating Blazing Saddles musical. Thomas Meehan co-wrote the book to The Producers and Young Frankenstein, which were both directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman.

The national tour of Young Frankenstein begins a run at Toronto's Princess of Wales Theatre on March 17.