“Everything
About it Is Appealing”
Shout hallelujah, come on get happy! Judgment day has
come again, judgment, that is, of the flops and fads, the hambones and hits, the
artists and aspirants that contribute to the continuing survival of the Fabulous
Invalid, down one minute and up the next.
It’s been five and a half years since the last
edition of Gerard Alessandrini’s Forbidden Broadway
series, born 38 years ago and still finding furiously funny ways to burlesque,
spoof, parody, and otherwise make digestible mincemeat of the American musical
theatre, with enough room left to grind up a choice movie, TV show, or straight
play.
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| Aline Mayagoitia, Chris Collins-Pisano, Immanuel Houston, Jenny Lee Stern, Joshua Turchin. All photos: Carol Rosegg. |
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| Fred Barton, Chris Collins-Pisano, Immanuel Houston, Aline Mayagoitia, Jenny Lee Stern. |
As per the formula, the songs—accompanied by the
sensational piano playing of Fred Barton, seated upstage—are both vintage and
recent, using Alessandrini’s consistently clever lyrics to poke fun at productions,
performers, practices, and pretensions.
It all begins with Immanuel Houston singing the original
Forbidden Broadway song about the Great White Way only for him to be
interrupted by an annoying family of out-of-towners checking out the theatres
and shows. This segues into “God, I Wanna See it 2019,” based on the opening
number from A Chorus Line, riffing on hit shows and major venues they want
to see, with nods to Broadway sights like the Naked Cowboy and all the Elmos. Word
bombs drop (Sara Bareillis, creator of Waitress, is “the queen of pop
shlock”) and coming shows, like Six are hinted at.
Then, in “Forbidden Hadestown,” Houston assumes the
guise of Hadestown’s André de Shields to guide the group through the
theatrical hellscape aboard his train, even magically inserting the family into
the shows he introduces.
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| Fred Barton, Joshua Turchin, Jenny Lee Stern, Chris Collins-Pisano. |
Soon Moulin Rouge (“Follies without a
soul”) is getting knocked around in “Moulin Rude” because of how much cash its “visual
overload” cost. The voluptuous Aline Mayogoitia channels Karen Olivo as she slithers
through “Diamonds Out My Wazzoo,” inspired by “Diamonds are Forever.” The company
responds with a number based on “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” tossing
darts at a certain musical trend, represented by Moulin Rouge’s 76 pop
songs, with lines like “A juke box is a star’s best friend.”
Dear Evan Hansen gets
the Forbidden treatment in “Evan Has-Been,” with multiply talented 13-year-old
(!) Joshua Turchin doing the honors as an overacting “replacement Evan Hansen”
(“Depending on my cuteness, I’m as precious as can be, Is everyone in love with
me?”).
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| Jenny Lee Stern, Fred Barton, Chris Collins-Pisano, Immanuel Houston. |
A Wheel of Fortune, with show titles on it, sparks a
sequence called “Everything’s Got to Be a Musical,” beginning with an original
pastiche song about musicals based on familiar classics (“Ev’ry movie or novel or
cartoon or epic must be resurrected”). Thus arise numbers reminding us of Beetlejuice,
featuring Chris Collins-Pisano as Alex Brightman; Tootsie, with Turchin
in drag doing Santino Fontana; and Frozen, with the ice princess taken
by Mayagoitia.
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| Chris Collins-Pisano, Jenny Lee Stern. |
Here the show shifts to the TV miniseries, “Fosse/Verdon,”
highlighting the love/hate relationship of Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon as
portrayed by Collins-Pisano and Jenny Lee Stern, replete with a virtual
encyclopedia of Fosse moves. Meanwhile, they sing and dance to “Whatever Fosse wants,
Fosse gets,” before shifting to “Two lost stars, From the old golden age” (no
need to cite the originals, right?).
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| Jenny Lee Stern, Chris Collins-Pisano. |
Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of the
Temptations gets a big number when Houston sings about
star Jeremy Pope while the show itself is spiked with cracks like “Ain’t Too
Proud is Jersey Boys with much less gumba,” and director Des McAnuff
is ticketed for begging, borrowing, and stealing from his own shows.
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| Fred Barton, Jenny Lee Stern. |
Those, like me, who think Renée Zellweger’s Judy Garland
in the movie Judy deserved a Golden Raspberry rather than a SAG Award
will thrill to Stern’s show-stopping rendition of Garland zinging her cinema
avatar with “Zellweger smells in my part,” set to the music of “Zing! Went the
Strings of My Heart.” (Note to my RZ-hating FB friend, DM: are you satisfied
now?)
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| Immanuel Houston, Chris Collins-Pisano, Fred Barton. |
Even the venerable, venerated Fiddler on the Roof, whose
production in Yiddish became a surprise Off-Broadway hit, gets its strings
risibly plucked in “Translation,” based on “Tradition,” after which we hear the
admonition, “Brush up your Yiddish,” as a recipe for theatrical success.
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| Jenny Lee Stern, Aline Mayagoita, Chris Collins-Pisano, Joshua Turchin, Immanuel Houston. |
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| Joshua Turchin, Fred Barton, Jenny Lee Stern, Chris Collins-Pisano, Immanuel Houston, Aline Mayagoitia. |
Jez Butterworth’s The Ferryman ferries away
from musical theatre to ask, to the tune of “How Are Things in Glocca Morra?” “How
are things in Irish drama, Can we see Martin McDonagh there?” Another routine
offers Billy Porter (Houston) and Lin-Manuel Miranda (Collins-Pisano), title-dropping
Freestyle Love Supreme, Kinky Boots, and the like to point out, to
the tune of Gypsy’s “Rose’s Turn,” how “everything is now inclusive” in
the theatre.
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| Immanuel Houston, Chris Collins-Pisano. |
Stern, as Mary Poppins, informs us “Where the Lost
Shows Go” (set to Mary Poppins’s “The Place Where Lost Things Go”); Turchin
and Collins-Pisano use the music of “Bibbiddi-Bobbiddi-Boo” from Disney’s Cinderella
and “Magic to Do” from Pippin to satirize Harry Potter and the Cursed
Child; and a standout section, “There’s Gotta Be Something For Us to Do,” earned
my vote as best of the best. In it, Stern as Bette Midler, Mayagoitia as
Bernadette Peters, and Houston as Jennifer Hudson contemplate parts they’d like
to play to the music of Sweet Charity’s “There’s Gotta Be Something
Better than This.”
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| Fred Barton, Immanuel Houston, Jenny Lee Stern, Aline Mayagoitia. |
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| Fred Barton, Joshua Turchin, Jenny Lee Stern, Chris Collins-Pisano, Immanuel Houston, Aline Mayagoitia. |
Daniel Fish’s revisionist staging of Oklahoma!,
and others like it get a much-deserved thrashing in “Woke-lahoma!” before
the revue returns to André de Shields complaining of too many shows being “processed
like Velveeta cheese.” This cues a routine based on The Prom, pondering
the question of the best way to end a show.
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| Fred Barton, Chris Collins-Pisano, Jenny Lee Stern, Aline Mayagoitia. |
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| Immanuel Mayagoitia, Chris Collins-Pisano, Fred Barton, Aline Mayagoitia, Jenny Lee Stern, Joshua Turchin. |
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| Aline Mayagoitia, Fred Barton, Immanuel Houston, Chris Collins-Pisano, Jenny Lee Stern, Joshua Turchin. |
Chris Steckel’s lighting, Dustin Cross’s costumes,
Conor Donnelly’s wigs, and Julian Evans’s sound couldn’t be better, nor, for
this material, could Gerry McIntyre’s tongue-in-cheek choreography or the inventive
direction of Alessandrini be any better. Forbidden Broadway: The Next
Generation ranges on the humor scale from smiles to chuckles to laughs to guffaws.
Its humor may be cutting, but why else would it be forbidden?
York Theatre Company
619 Lexington Ave., NYC
Through February 16
