Luckily, there’s plenty of song-and-dance fun to fill this gap. But it would be better if there were both. And there’s no real way to match the black-and-white film’s hilarious dead-on parody of the classic horror movies of the 1930s. Those movies were about as far from a lavishly produced 21st-century Broadway musical as anything could be, although Brooks does often successfully capture the quality of old-horror-movie music in his underscoring.

Andrea Martin is often very funny as creepy housekeeper Frau Blucher (the Cloris Leachman role originally), and she has a great number whose title is taken from one of the big laugh lines in the movie: “He Vas My Boyfriend.” Sutton Foster, who has actually starred in more Broadway hits than most of the other headliners here, has a less inherently funny part than Mullally or Martin – she’s the sexy lab assistant Inga, and though she gives it her best and has plenty of stage time, she’s never as crazy-silly as the others. This problem also crops up with Roger Bart, who ends up playing straight man to the hellzapoppin wildness around him. It’s unfair but inevitable to compare him to Wilder (co-author of the film script as well as the star), who gave a classic screwball performance – but Bart, here, too rarely shows the gift for spectacular silliness he displayed in The Producers.

Shuler Hensley, as The Monster, and Fred Applegate, in a nifty dual turn as a police inspector and a blind hermit, provide nimble support and are called on to carry two of the best-remembered scenes from the movie: the Monster’s hilariously disastrous slapstick visit with the hermit, and the one musical number actually in the film, “Puttin’ on the Ritz.”

Director/choreographer Susan Stroman pulls out all the stops for “Ritz,” which in the movie is just a simple (and very funny) gag. Here it is stretched out for ten minutes or so, with chorus lines of monsters and even room for Inga and Igor to join in. The number encapsulates what’s right and what’s wrong with Broadway’s version of Young Frankenstein. Everyone knows they have to be over-the-top here, and they make it even bigger, more excessive, than you might imagine. And it’s fun, but it’s also, in the end, just too much.

Sets vibrate and fly apart and whirl around, strobes flash, and the big dance numbers keep on coming and coming. The people behind this show are making a Herculean effort. But they might actually be better off relaxing a bit and just being funny. When they do that, and it does happen several times in 150 minutes, this over-amplified, overgrown theme-park ride of a show seems worth all the fuss.