We set out in the spring of 1999 casting actors who would appropriately resemble Boris Karloff, Béla Lugosi, Lon Chaney, Jr., Claude Rains, and Elsa Lanchester. Additionally, we also sought to represent the “straight” or non-monster actors who were in the great film classics. As a result, we endeavored to cast a Dwight Frye, Colin Clive, Ernest Thesiger, Maria Ouspenskaya, and the wonderful Una O’Connor. Plus, we would need a Jack Pierce, no easy casting task. The idea of including more than just monster characters intrigued the expanding crew, many of whom we would need months in advance of the planned two-hour stage show. “Having the chance to recreate not just the monsters, but the characters themselves, was really a great concept,” said Burman. “That really attracted me to this project.”
In the early incarnations of the conceived show, we wanted both a young Pierce, who would be seen interacting with the various actors in backstage scenes, and an older Pierce, established as a narrator looking back upon key moments in his life. In fact, early drafts of the script featured studio executives Carl Laemmle and Carl Jr., director James Whale, and actor Glenn Strange. However, due to budget constraints, those elements would ultimately be cut as live actor versions in favor of re-creating them as voice-overs and onscreen photo and video playbacks.
In cutting the amount of live performers, we would reduce the original 100+-costume list to fewer than 25 and cut a 108-page script to 45 pages. Nevertheless, we also had to lose some great scenes from the annals of the Frankenstein films: Pierce and Lugosi testing an original Monster makeup; the legendary meeting of Boris Karloff and James Whale at the Universal commissary; the famed creation of Pierce’s sixth Frankenstein Monster by surprising friend Glenn Strange (Pierce had covered his makeup mirror and unbeknownst to Strange, put him into a new version of the Monster makeup while the actor lay in Pierce’s makeup chair). In the end, we chose to re-create vignettes from The Man Who Laughs, the first three Frankenstein films, The Mummy, The Invisible Man, and The Wolf Man. Production designer John Ivanoff constructed partial sets for those films and Jack Pierce’s makeup lab.
