What happens when the spoof is as venerable as the spoofed?
The answer, at least on the evidence presented in the new version of Forbidden Broadway, which opened tonight at the Triad Theater on the Upper West Side, is this: Moderate amusement, a few good jokes, a lot of middling ones, and no real reason for existing except that it has always existed.
Gerard Alessandrini invented Forbidden nearly 40 years, debuting his cabaret of Broadway parodies at this very same theater, then called Pallson’s Supper Club, in the spring of 1982. It ran nearly constantly, in several locations, for the next three decades, with regular updates. The last time I saw the show, in its Special Victims Unit edition, was in 2004. That version, at least according the review I filed then, was knowing about its own age, and it mostly worked, even if it wasn’t always so up-to-date.
[Read David Finkle’s ★★★★ review here.]
More recently, it’s taken some multi-year breaks, and Forbidden Broadway: The Next Generation, as this latest endeavor is called, is the first installment since 2014. It appears to be all-new, as always written and directed by Alessandrini, with music direction by Fred Barton. The plot revolves around a tourist family eager to see some good shows, led through current Broadway productions by Hadestown’s André De Shields, usually the guide to the underworld down at the Walter Kerr.
It covers all its current bases, with jokes about everything from Dear Evan Hansen to Moulin Rouge to the Broadway-adjacent, like Fosse/Verdon and Judy. It features witty costume and charmingly referential choreography. It doesn’t have the hoary old Phantom bit I cited in my 2004 review (there’s a different, much smaller mask-and-chandelier reference). But, still, not much feels fresh.
Some of the better numbers lines and bits certainly land. The slinky Fosse/Verdon number shines, more because of its Fosse-light choreography than because of any great lyrical wit. “Brush Up Your Yiddish,” a take on the successful Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish — “seems meshugganah, no?” — proves that a Cole Porter patter song is funny in any language. Hal Prince appears, appropriately God-like (or, really, Starkeeper from Carousel-like), to warn that when you appear in a Broadway parody, “You’ll Never Work Again,” which, for an actor, is presumably a fate worse than walking alone.
The performer for whom this carries the greatest risk is Jenny Lee Stern, who, in classic brassy belter form, gives by far the night’s best performances — as Gwen Verdon (doing Michelle doing Gwen), as Judy Garland (bitching about Renée Zellweger: “Sometimes I’m thin/ sometimes I’m fat/ But I always squint/ like a puffy-eyed cat”), as Bette Midler. The rest of the five-person cast — Chris Collins-Pisano (also strong), Aline Mayagoitia, Immanuel Houston (better as Jennifer Hudson than De Shields), and Joshua Turchin — is competent. Barton pounds away at the piano, Gerry McIntyre has fun with the referential choreography, and Dustin Cross creates costumes that help the actors sell their bits.
But the problem is that the show doesn’t really have a point of view. It makes fun of tourist-driven shows and get-up-and-cheer megamix finales, but it also makes fun of the stripped-down Oklahoma and the recent, much less dramatic, rethinks of My Fair Lady and Kiss Me Kate. It makes fun of the vanity of Broadway divas, but it also makes a point of dissing the new, replacement Evan Hansen, which just feels like punching down. (The digs about oversinging and borderline psychosis were just as true of the beloved, Tony-winning originator.) A flamboyant Billy Porter-meets-Madam Rose number, “Everything Now Is Inclusive,” seems to be mildly celebrating rather than mocking the onetime Kinky Boots star’s genderbending, but it also feels woefully out place two and a half years into the Trump administration.
If there’s any coherent argument, it’s that modern Broadway does too little that’s new. The bravura pastiche number “It’s Got to Be a Musical” parodies the wide variety of repurposed properties that have made it to Broadway stages this year: Beetlejuice and Tootsie and Frozen and Moulin Rouge. “Sooner or later,” Alessandrini’s lyrics go, “most every old movie/ has go to be/ a musical.”
Yes, in its 38th year, Forbidden Broadway finds Broadway too derivative.
Forbidden Broadway: The Next Generation opened October 16, 2019, at the Triad and runs through November 30. Tickets and information: forbiddenbroadway.com
