Mel Brooks on Blazing Saddles the musical

When I heard that Mel Brooks had written a couple of songs for a musical version of Blazing Saddles my initial reaction was "Mel, this is meshugas. You're 83, do you really need the tsuris?"

Then I thought no, that's wrong. He's 83 and if he wants to write a Blazing Saddles musical, who am I to tell him to stop? He's already got the theme song from the movie.

This time though, I'm not getting my hopes up. While I'm a big fan of Brooks as a filmmaker, I'm lukewarm on Brooks as the creator of Broadway musicals.

Granted, I've never seen The Producers on stage, although I have watched the movie of the musical. But I did see Young Frankenstein on Broadway and I was disappointed. The tongue-in-cheek homage to horror films didn't translate well.

Unlike The Producers, which won 12 Tony Awards and ran for six years, the Tony-less Young Frankenstein got lukewarm reviews and closed in a little over a year.

But that hasn't deterred Brooks.

In an interview with the Canadian Press, he reveals that he's working on the Blazing Saddles musical, although he warns that the project might not pan out.

"I don't know - if I did it, I wouldn't rush to New York with it because the Times would say: 'Oh, oh dear, another movie converted and transmogrified into a musical.' ''

Personally, I'm not convinced a Blazing Saddles musical would work. I don't know whether some of the most well-known scenes in this sendup of Westerns would translate well to the stage. And then there's the film's use of a racial epithet.

The best part of the interview, though, was the comparison Brooks made between film and theatre:

"Film takes an eternity - it takes an eternity! - and there are, like, infinite collaborations, which waters down anything.

"But the stage is: you throw your naked heart on the stage and they respond to it or not, and it's immediate. You send a bad joke out there and you get this big laugh or you grow wings and fly. It's just amazing."