Review: 'Forbidden Broadway' Sticks It to the Great Woke Way

BEN BRANTLEY: It appears an old friend of ours — a great gossip and major theater queen — is back in town and dying to dish. I’m talking about “Forbidden Broadway,” Gerard Alessandrini’s 37-year-old satirical revue, which is shaking a leg with renewed vigor at the Triad Theater. We both felt the show was looking kind of burned-out the last time we saw it, in 2014.

JESSE GREEN: In your review of that edition — called “Forbidden Broadway Comes Out Swinging!” — you wondered whether Alessandrini was running out of targets juicy enough to satirize. In mine, I wondered whether he was running out of craft. Do you think he’s found more of both this time? After all, the new edition, which he also directed, is subtitled “The Next Generation.”

BRANTLEY: Well, he certainly struck fool’s gold with the fabulous parody sequence called “Woke-lahoma!,” after Daniel Fish’s politically deconstructionist interpretation of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Oklahoma!”

GREEN: I agree, but that’s cherry-picking: “Woke-lahoma!” — “There’s a bright glaring light on the bleachers/There’s an ugly green light on my features” — is the show’s highlight. It has all the elements of the best “Forbidden Broadway” sketches: delicious mimicry, a pungent theme (in this case, politically correct revivals) and well-crafted lyrics that are also on point.

BRANTLEY: Your “but” implies you don’t think the show sustained that level of acuity. Which is true but forgivable, I think. There are sequences in this version that feel like they were conceived on autopilot. (The “Dear Evan Hansen” spoof, reimagined as “Dear Evan Has-Been,” feels like a retread of Alessandrini’s “Annie” shtick of years ago, about the built-in obsolescence of child stars.) On the other hand, the backward- and forward-looking scope of the show — and even its patchiness — kind of mirrors the unresolved personality of Broadway itself these days.

GREEN: I agree, which is why I think this edition is the best in recent memory, even accounting for dud elements like the “Hadestown” number. There’s also a pro forma spoof of “Moulin Rouge” as “Moulin Rude” that includes a Karen Olivo/Marilyn Monroe mash-up called “Diamonds Out My Wazoo.” It captures the musical’s vulgarity, but that’s a low bar.

BRANTLEY: On the other hand, going to a “Forbidden Broadway” is for me like sitting down and schmoozing with a friend who shares an obsession. And true obsessives can’t embrace Broadway without dancing with its ghosts a bit. The recent “Fosse/Verdon” television series gives Alessandrini the peg to riff (delightfully, I thought) on our enduring fascination with a mythic Broadway past, when stars’ talents were often matched by their self-destructiveness.

GREEN: That segment includes on-target song parodies — “Whatever Fosse Wants,” “Two Lost Stars” — and a witty caricature of Verdon by Jenny Lee Stern. Stern really brings the goods, not only as Verdon but also as Mary Poppins (“The Place Where Lost Shows Go”) and, in a brilliant double-decker impersonation, as Judy Garland as Renée Zellweger in “Chicago.”

BRANTLEY: Wasn’t that bliss? The number starts out with Garland complaining that Zellweger has dared to impersonate her in the current film “Judy.” And the frame for her lamentation is a reworking of “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart” as “Zellweger Smells in My Part!” That’s a great example of Alessandrini’s ability to create a, uh, zingy dialogue between the musical comedy world of then and now, and between the rivalrous forms of Broadway and Hollywood musicals.

GREEN: He also takes some shots at nonmusicals in this edition. One is a well-aimed zap at Jez Butterworth’s “The Ferryman,” reframing “How Are Things in Glocca Morra?” from “Finian’s Rainbow” as “How Are Things in Irish Drama?”

BRANTLEY: Ah, that one pierces Butterworth’s lugubriousness and luridness right in the solar plexus. I also enjoyed Chris Collins-Pisano and Immanuel Houston celebrating (and gently skewering) the new creed of inclusivity by embodying (respectively) Lin-Manuel Miranda and Billy Porter. (“Everyone now has a chance to play Mama Rose,” sings Porter, to the tune of “Everything’s Coming Up Roses.”)

GREEN: Another reason I liked this edition, which features the tireless Fred Barton at the piano, is that it’s not just an excuse for mockery but also an opportunity for reflection. The idea that Broadway is being passed from old hands to new ones is touchingly addressed in a couple of numbers. One of them imagines three classic divas — Bette Midler (Stern again), Bernadette Peters (Aline Mayagoitia) and Jennifer Holliday (Houston in drag) — singing “There’s Gotta Be Something for Us to Do,” based on the great “Sweet Charity” number. And then there’s the closing sequence, centered on “Our Time” from “Merrily We Roll Along,” which I found unexpectedly moving.

BRANTLEY: Yep, I misted up at that point. Alessandrini knows which old songs will forever push a Broadway-phile’s buttons. He takes “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from “Carousel” and retools it for his current team (which also includes a bona fide next-generation member, the adolescent Joshua Turchin). And he adds a sweet dig to offset the sentimentality, as these performers realize that being in a spoof like this might mean “You’ll Never Work Again.”

GREEN: Framing the sequence is the great Broadway director Harold Prince (Collins-Pisano) reimagined as the heavenly Starkeeper from “Carousel.” You could not find a more potent avatar of the world that Alessandrini adores and teases than Prince, who died in July. When the show was over, I wondered whether — new generation or not — Broadway would ever again supply the ripe makings of a new “Forbidden Broadway.”

BRANTLEY: Might we let the weary, wily Aunt Testa (that’s Stern as Mary Testa playing Aunt Eller in “Woke-lahoma!”) have the last word? “If ya live long enough,” she says, “you’re going to see some bizarre theater. Hearing beautiful acoustic music played on an electric guitar, seeing Rodgers and Hammerstein staged in a gymnasium, sitting through ‘The Rose Tattoo’ with Marisa Tomei, watching ‘Company’ with a female Bobby … and Patti LuPone.” Bless that ol’ gal, her crustiness gives me hope.

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Production Notes

‘Forbidden Broadway: The Next Generation’

Tickets: Through Nov. 30 at the Triad Theater, Manhattan; forbiddenbroadway.com. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes.

Credits: Written and directed by Gerard Alessandrini; choreography by Gerry McIntyre; costumes by Dustin Cross; sets by Glenn Bassett; sound by Sound Associates; musical direction by Fred Barton; production stage manager, Yaman Palak; general management, Brierpatch Productions; production supervisor, Mr. Bassett. Presented by John Freedson, Harriet Yellin, Peter Brash, David Zippel and Mr. Alessandrini in association with Tzili Charney.

Cast: Immanuel Houston, Aline Mayagoitia, Chris Collins-Pisano, Jenny Lee Stern, Joshua Turchin and Fred Barton.

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