Review: Forbidden Broadway Mercilessly Mauls the Hits

20.09.2024 23:23

New York Observer

When I was a callow theater kid, I hated musicals: it was a bastard genre, inferior to the classics and modern drama. To be honest, I didn’t know any musicals, so my distaste was based on ignorance and secondhand derision—cartoons and spoofs. A Broadway-besotted college chum took pity and made me a Stephen Sondheim mixtape. He included (along with tracks from Merrily, George, Sweeney, et cetera) “Into the Words” from Forbidden Broadway: Volume 2 (1991). The piss-taking ditty lampooned the density and complexity of Sondheim’s lyrics to the tune of the “Prologue” from Into the Woods: “Into the words / That fly and try to make you / Choke the joke you’ve sung / Into the words / More letters than / They sell on Wheel of Fortune.” Somehow, this mockery increased my admiration even more.

Decades after my classmate enlightened me, I’m the polar opposite of a musical-phobic youth: I have many opinions about Broadway shows. Especially recent ones—which take a jolly beating in Forbidden Broadway: Merrily We Stole a Song, the new batch of sung spoofs and malicious medleys by Gerard Alessandrini. The master satirist’s long-lived revue is 42 years old and a cottage industry (with national tours and multiple albums). He and his cast of wildly talented mimics took a long, hard look at the 2023–24 season and said, “Phooey!” To get the gags, is it essential to have suffered through—I mean, sat through—song-and-dance spectacles of past years? Not really. Idly browsing social media you probably learned that Eddie Redmayne’s Emcee from the Cabaret revival was divisive, to say the least.

To say the most (and Alessandrini does), the twitchy Brit stank. As droll accompanist Fred Barton plunks out the Kurt Weill–y vamp from “Wilkommen,” Danny Hayward enters in classic Joel Grey-as-Emcee drag, taking us on a tour of the role: camped up by Alan Cumming in the ’90s then clowned into garish nonsense by Redmayne. Hayward morphs between his nested impersonations with the help of Dustin Cross’s ingenious tear-away costumes. Jenny Lee Stern joins the savaging as a demented Gayle Rankin who shrieks her way through Sally Bowles’s titular tune: “What good is playing this role the ol’ way / Liza was just o.k.! / Come see my dark deranged display / Come drag my painted corpse away / When I murder Cabaret!”

Later, the formidable Stern appears in a sendup of “The Ladies Who Lunch” (Company was a couple of seasons back, but who’s counting). Stern delivers a pitchy-perfect version of Patti LuPone’s consonant-melting, lyric-chewing, melismatic snarl. Nicole Vanessa Ortiz likewise has fun reproducing Audra McDonald’s opera-meets-Broadway soprano in a melodramatic take on “Rose’s Turn,” as the six-time Tony winner shudders before the ghost of Ethel Merman. (Audra’s Gypsy opens in December.)

Everybody comes in for a spanking, even straight plays. The impish Chris Collins-Pisano dons brunette pigtails as Cole Escola urging us to “attend the tale of Mary Todd.” Continuing the women-in-politics theme, Stern pops up as Shaina Taub (pronounced “Tobb,” for a nearer rhyme) heralded as “the Lin-Manuel of New Broadway.” Although grumbling that Broadway musicals are vulgar, derivative, and phony is like complaining that action movies contain violence, Alessandrini has standards and he’s not afraid to uphold them, with a wink. Ben Platt is a narcissistic warbler. Hell’s Kitchen is ersatz self-mythologizing. Lincoln Center is full of snobs. Merrily We Roll Along recouped only because of “Harry Potter, Inc.” One of the best extended gags involves Back to the Future’s Marty McFly (Hayward) and Doc Brown (Collins-Pisano) time-warping to 1945 (in search of musicals that were artful and affordable), and accidentally derailing the artistic development of 15-year-old Stephen Sondheim. Dazzled by Doc’s space-age DeLorean, Sondheim grows up to be a car designer, meaning that Broadway in the 23rd century is an AI wasteland of robots and reboots and celebrity branding (a video backdrop of the future Great White Way includes a marquis for the Sean Hayes Theatre.)

Forbidden Broadway is a goof, but a virtuosic and stylish one, with infectious comic verve and lyrics that range from wittily inspired to boldly dumb (rhyming “earplugs” with “queer drugs”). It’s Mad Magazine with jazz hands; Saturday Night Live with people who can actually sing and dance; the antidote to hate watching; and a much-needed immunization for the season.