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Theater Review | 'Forbidden Broadway Goes to Rehab'

Giving Their Regards by Skewering the Shows

Forbidden Broadway Goes to Rehab
NYT Critic’s Pick

Can this really be the end of “Forbidden Broadway”? It’s true that this venerable satiric revue was looking a bit peaked when I checked in on it a year ago, as if the exertions of searching for shows distinctive enough to caricature in a bland Broadway season had sapped it of its natural vim and vinegar.

But having announced that it would be officially ending its nearly 27-year reign of merry terror on Jan. 15, Gerard Alessandrini’s long-lived show appears to have been blessed with that burst of have-to-win energy that descends on weary racers as they near the finish line. Its latest incarnation, which opened Wednesday night at the 47th Street Theater, finds an old war horse of spoofery with muscles tautened, nostrils flaring and teeth polished and sharpened — the better to kick, snort at and bite the institution that has fed it for so many years.

Its title is “Forbidden Broadway Goes to Rehab.” And though the clinic where the show rehabilitated itself is never identified, it’s clearly the place to send anyone and anything in need of rejuvenation. (Is it possible to book a reservation for the American economy?) Written (as always) by Mr. Alessandrini, who directed with Phillip George, and performed by a talent-packed five-member ensemble, this is the liveliest, sauciest and saddest “Forbidden Broadway” in over a decade.

I say saddest because if Mr. Alessandrini is serious, he’s putting the show to bed when this version ends its run — at least as an annual event in New York. “When Broadway becomes too theme-park-like, it makes it too difficult,” said Mr. Alessandrini in a recent interview in The New York Times, reflecting on the paucity of new subjects worthy of his mockery.

This awareness of Broadway’s creative poverty lent a crabby listlessness to his last show, which often had the feeling of a singing whinefest. This time he explores the same subjects but with an air of angry glee instead of defeat. The long arm of Disney, the reliance on brand-name song books and movie titles, the reduction of talented performers to moveable scenery parts: all these targets are set up for shooting once again.

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"Forbidden Broadway Goes to Rehab" stars, from left, Jared Bradshaw, Michael West and Gina Kreiezmar, at 47th Street Theater.Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Yet even vignettes recycled and retweaked from earlier “Forbidden” editions have new asperity and crispness. Listen and weep, hysterically, to that know-it-all nanny Mary Poppins as she breaks down the formula practiced by the Disney Company and the producer Cameron Mackintosh, to the tune of “Feed the Birds”:

Feed the ’burbs
Tepid a show
Tepid, vapid, titles they know
Feed the ’burbs
Humongous size
While overhead
A scared actress flies.

Of course it helps that the song is delivered by Gina Kreiezmar in a voice that milks every drop of condescension from a purer-than-thou soprano and received British accent.

The strapping Ms. Kreiezmar has the essential parodist’s gift of magnifying without melting whatever she’s sending up. So, happily, does the rest of the cast members, who come in a clownish assortment of shapes and sizes: the tiny Christina Bianco; the matinee-idol-chiseled Jared Bradshaw; and the hard-bodied, joker-faced Michael West. (David Caldwell is the protean pianist and musical director.)

When a show has its own personality, the creative team here knows exactly how to attack. Mr. West memorably vivisects the distracting angular rapster’s gestures of Lin-Manuel Miranda in a number that portrays the Tony-winning musical “In the Heights” as “ ‘West Side Story’ lite.”

Tracy Letts’s much-acclaimed drama “August: Osage County” is presented as a vicious boxing match between its quarreling mother and daughter characters, in which blows are steadily dealt to the show’s claims of originality. And last season’s first-rate spoof of “Spring Awakening,” in which boys keep microphones beneath their zippers, is reprised in high style.

Not all shows — make that very few shows — have their own voices these days, a point made excruciatingly clear by a reinterpretation of the score of the new musical “A Tale of Two Cities” (which opens Thursday night), in which Mr. West (imitating James Barbour as Sidney Carton) sings, “You thought the British op’ricle was hell/ But try to sing this retread ‘Scarlet Pimpernel.’ ”

Mr. Alessandrini will occasionally graft one show onto another with far more inspired results than those practiced by the body-part-stitching title character of “Young Frankenstein” (which gets the crude but lethal parody it deserves here). For the revival of “Equus,” young Daniel Radcliffe (a winningly coy Mr. Bradshaw) sheds his “Harry Potter” robes in a striptease to the tune of “Let Me Entertain You.” (“Let me enter naked/Let me strut un-cut.”)

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From left, Christina Bianco, Michael West and Gina Kreiezmar in "Forbidden Broadway Goes to Rehab."Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Which brings us to what “Forbidden Broadway” calls “this year’s annual revival of ‘Gypsy.’” Mr. Alessandrini must have sung hallelujah when he learned Patti LuPone would be returning to Broadway in the role of Momma Rose. Ms. LuPone is one of the few outsized, hyper-stylized personalities left in the musical theater. And Ms. Kreiezmar, mouth atwist and eyes aglitter, knows just what to do as she sings, “Everything’s commming out Patti!” (She also does a spot-on Liza, but then, who doesn’t?)

While another, younger Broadway original, Kristin Chenoweth, appears to have forsaken the stage for the small screen, Mr. Alessandrini uses this transfer of allegiance for a number based on the “Candide” show-off piece “Glitter and Be Gay,” retitled “Glitter and Be Glib.” Ms. Bianco brilliantly delivers the number in Ms. Chenoweth’s two voices: the cute nasal one and the operatic soprano.

Inevitably there’s an undercurrent of elegy to “Forbidden Broadway Goes to Rehab.” A caricature of Kelli O’Hara and Paulo Szot in “South Pacific” turns “Some Enchanted Evening” into “Some Endangered Species.” And the show’s last number is a largely sincere tribute to Stephen Sondheim, presenting him as the last of a race of titans. Who can blame Mr. Alessandrini for feeling it’s time to close shop?

A witty ensemble piece about Internet showbiz chat rooms (called “All That Chat,” in an apparent reference to the so-named chat area on the theater Web site talkinbroadway.com, and led by Ms. Bianco as Bebe Neuwirth in “Chicago”) suggests that gossip about Broadway shows has become more entertaining than the shows themselves. “Who needs theater tix, when you can get your kicks on ‘All That Chat’?” the song asks.

But such Web-dipping is a poor substitute for the barbed Cliffs Notes “Forbidden Broadway” has regularly provided. Anyone who wanted to be well-informed about the state of New York theater without having to shell out the ever-inflating big bucks need only have turned to Mr. Alessandrini and company. What will the simple folk do without them?

FORBIDDEN BROADWAY GOES TO REHAB

Created and written by Gerard Alessandrini; directed by Mr. Alessandrini and Phillip George; costumes by Alvin Colt; sets by Megan K. Halpern; lighting by Mark T. Simpson; additional costume consultant, David Moyer; musical director, David Caldwell; production by Pete Blue; production stage manager, Jim Griffith; general manager, Ellen Rusconi; produced in association with Gary Hoffman, Jerry Kravat and Masakazu Shibaoka. Presented by the 47th Street Theater, John Freedson, Harriet Yellin and Jon B. Platt. At the 47th Street Theater, 304 West 47th Street, Clinton; (212) 239-6200. Through January 15. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes.

WITH: Christina Bianco, Jared Bradshaw, Gina Kreiezmar, Michael West and David Caldwell.

A correction was made on 
Sept. 19, 2008

A picture caption on Thursday with a theater review of “Forbidden Broadway Goes to Rehab” reversed the identity of two actors. Jared Bradshaw was at the left, and Michael West was in the center.

How we handle corrections

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