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[title]For 25 years, Gerard Alessandrini’s Forbidden Broadway revues skewered New York’s commercial theater, rewriting lyrics to showtunes both classic and current to poke fun at everything on the Great White Way. Alessandrini pricks the egos of stars (favorite targets include Julie Andrews and Patti LuPone) and deconstructs Broadway trends from the Disneyfication of Times Square to the penchant for puppets. Alessandrini and the New York cast bring the revue Forbidden Broadway: Special Victims Unit to Chicago this week for a ten-week run.
How did Forbidden Broadway come about?
Well, parody lyrics aren’t anything new, you know, I’m sure people have been doing them since Greek times. I guess the angle I brought to it was I was able to critique what was on Broadway with the lyrics, sort of string up the victims by their own rope. I’d been studying writing at BMI Workshop, and I wrote the show for myself and a friend to do as kind of a cabaret act. It became clear it was more of a theater piece, so we added a couple of friends of mine, and it sort of took off on its own. It soon became clear that we could change it as the theater scene changed—we’re talking 25 years ago, so Dreamgirls was just opening up, and there were new shows coming in like Cats, believe it or not, so as those new shows came in we added new numbers.
How often do you add new material?
Well, it’s irregular, but a lot. Week to week. Sometimes we’ll have six months where the show stays basically the same, but we’re always changing lines week to week. And then every year and a half or so we totally rehaul. We’ve had a lot of fun with this edition, SVU, with the angle of, Is bad theater a crime? Should it be punished?
Aside from the casts and the shows parodied, how has Forbidden Broadway changed over the years?
Every edition does sort of have its own tone, depending on what’s on Broadway that season. Some years the show seems darker and others it’s more theme park–like, and that’s because Broadway may have darker musicals one season and more theme park, Disney-type shows the next. And of course comedy changes over the years almost as much as styles in clothes change. Sometimes non sequiturs will be funnier, at other points irony seems to be what our audience wants, or slapstick; it varies from year to year. And I feel like we’re sort of on the cutting edge of that, like a lot of Broadway successes of the past couple of years have been sort of imitating Forbidden Broadway—Spamalot, the Martin Short show [Fame Becomes Me], even to an extent Hairspray and things like that.
That seems to be the major trend in musicals, to comment on themselves as a genre: Avenue Q, The Producers—
The Producers I don’t count. I think Mel Brooks probably thought of most of that before I was born, so I don’t feel like he ripped us off in any way. But there have been a lot of shows since that I’m like, Oh my God, that’s so Forbidden Broadway. It’s the ironic musical, or as Sondheim told me, it’s called the “metamusical.” He says, “You haven’t heard that term? That’s what you are!” It’s the musical that comments on itself being a musical, as so many do these days, and Forbidden Broadway was sort of the original of that.
You seem to have an affinity for the anti-ironic, Golden Age stars.
Merman especially has been in every edition, and we tend to use Channing and Annie a lot. They’re fun to write for because you can contrast the old and the new; it’s fun to put the grand old stars next to Phantom of the Opera, or somebody from The Light in the Piazza. What would Merman think of Jersey Boys? She’s sort of a mascot for us at this point.