Once I was a callow theater child, I hated musicals: it was a bastard style, inferior to the classics and trendy drama. To be trustworthy, I didn’t know any musicals, so my distaste was primarily based on ignorance and secondhand derision—cartoons and spoofs. A Broadway-besotted school chum took pity and made me a Stephen Sondheim mixtape. He included (together with tracks from Merrily, George, Sweeney, et cetera) “Into the Phrases” from Forbidden Broadway: Quantity 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 phrases / That fly and attempt to make you / Choke the joke you’ve sung / Into the phrases / Extra letters than / They promote on Wheel of Fortune.” In some way, this mockery elevated my admiration much more.
Many years after my classmate enlightened me, I’m the polar reverse of a musical-phobic youth: I’ve many opinions about Broadway reveals. Particularly latest ones—which take a jolly beating in Forbidden Broadway: Merrily We Stole a Music, the brand new batch of sung spoofs and malicious medleys by Gerard Alessandrini. The grasp satirist’s long-lived revue is 42 years outdated and a cottage trade (with nationwide excursions and a number of albums). He and his forged of wildly proficient mimics took an extended, arduous have a look at the 2023–24 season and stated, “Phooey!” To get the gags, is it important to have suffered by—I imply, sat by—song-and-dance spectacles of previous years? Not likely. Idly searching social media you in all probability discovered that Eddie Redmayne’s Emcee from the Cabaret revival was divisive, to say the least.
To say essentially 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 traditional Joel Gray-as-Emcee drag, taking us on a tour of the function: camped up by Alan Cumming within the ’90s then clowned into garish nonsense by Redmayne. Hayward morphs between his nested impersonations with the assistance of Dustin Cross’s ingenious tear-away costumes. Jenny Lee Stern joins the savaging as a demented Gayle Rankin who shrieks her approach by Sally Bowles’s titular tune: “What good is taking part in this function the ol’ approach / Liza was simply o.ok.! / Come see my darkish deranged show / Come drag my painted corpse away / Once I homicide Cabaret!”
Later, the formidable Stern seems in a sendup of “The Girls Who Lunch” (Firm was a few seasons again, however who’s counting). Stern delivers a pitchy-perfect model of Patti LuPone’s consonant-melting, lyric-chewing, melismatic snarl. Nicole Vanessa Ortiz likewise has enjoyable reproducing Audra McDonald’s opera-meets-Broadway soprano in a melodramatic tackle “Rose’s Flip,” because the six-time Tony winner shudders earlier than the ghost of Ethel Merman. (Audra’s Gypsy opens in December.)
Everyone is available in for a spanking, even straight performs. The impish Chris Collins-Pisano dons brunette pigtails as Cole Escola urging us to “attend the story of Mary Todd.” Persevering with 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.” Though grumbling that Broadway musicals are vulgar, by-product, and phony is like complaining that motion films comprise violence, Alessandrini has requirements 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 Middle is stuffed with snobs. Merrily We Roll Alongside recouped solely due to “Harry Potter, Inc.” Probably the greatest prolonged gags entails Again to the Future’s Marty McFly (Hayward) and Doc Brown (Collins-Pisano) time-warping to 1945 (seeking musicals that had been suave and inexpensive), and by accident derailing the inventive improvement of 15-year-old Stephen Sondheim. Dazzled by Doc’s space-age DeLorean, Sondheim grows as much as be a automotive designer, that means that Broadway within the 23rd century is an AI wasteland of robots and reboots and celeb branding (a video backdrop of the long run Nice White Manner features a marquis for the Sean Hayes Theatre.)
Forbidden Broadway is a goof, however a virtuosic and trendy one, with infectious comedian verve and lyrics that vary from wittily impressed to boldly dumb (rhyming “earplugs” with “queer medicine”). It’s Mad Journal with jazz palms; Saturday Night time Reside with individuals who can really sing and dance; the antidote to hate watching; and a much-needed immunization for the season.
Forbidden Broadway: Merrily We Stole a Music | 1hr 30mins. No intermission. | Theatre 555 | 555 West forty second Avenue | 646-410-2277 | Purchase Tickets Right here
