Reviews
Sweet Parody
By James Yeara
Forbidden Broadway: Greatest Hits, Vol. 1
Written and created by Gerard Alessandrini, directed by Billy Kimmel, musical numbers staged by Billy Kimmel StageWorks/Hudson, through July 12
Forbidden Broadway is full of love: for musical theater, for entertainment, for the craft of acting, the talent for dancing, and the art of singing. People who truly love musical theater will be smitten by this 90-minute Valentine to musical theater. People who love to be entertained will be thrilled with this 27-year Off-Broadway veteran, which has been honored in the past with a Tony Award, an Obie Award, and a Drama Desk Award. People who admire ensemble acting, deft dancing, and eclectic singing will exalt the talents of Forbidden Broadway’s four-person cast. This pastiche parody is like a beautiful love affair.
Of course, as with most love affairs, Forbidden Broadway has a fair amount of slap and tickle, playful stings and bites, gratuitous displays, and the odd moment tied to a picnic table while covered in maple syrup, but such occasional awkward moments are the stuff true love is made on.
Briskly paced, the 20 scenes of StageWorks/Hudson’s regional premiere of Forbidden Broadway: Greatest Hits, Vol. 1 (there are various compilations of this recently closed show, repeatedly rewritten by creator Gerard Alessandrini as Broadway’s follies, excesses, and successes rolled out season by season) tumble by in a Vaudevillian pattern of blackouts and scenes. From the opening number, a parody of the Great White Way, Forbidden Broadway simultaneously skewers and admires shows from Chicago (an excellent number called “Glossy Fosse” uses the tune of “Razzle Dazzle” and features such lyrics as “Saucy Fosse’em/Spread the fingers/Wear a bowler hat/Though the set looks shoddy/Everybody likes a naked body”) to Disney’s The Lion King (“The Circle of Mice” sums up all you need to know about the Magic Kingdom’s aesthetic with the concluding “ker-ching”).
Billy Kimmel, an Off-Broadway veteran of Forbidden Broadway, serves as this production’s director/choreographer and as a quarter of the the four-member cast of actor-singer-dancers (all equally adept at each). Molly Parker-Myers proves a spot-on Bebe Neuwirth impressionist and offers a killer Chita Rivera in a West Side Story lampoon. Stephen Joshua Thompson’s “pussy on the stairs” and pose at the beginning of “I Enjoy Being a Cat” killed the audience with laughter. And Molly Marie Walsh was pure perfection; her washed-up grown-up Annie singing “Revive me, revive Me . . . before my red hair turns gray,” Rita Moreno in the “Chita/Rita” West Side Story duel (“I’m a talented actress/So long as you stay on the mattress”) and Liza Minnelli in “Liza One Note” all earned their standing ovations.
While the laughter poured out like a cold front from the west, the expertise displayed in the Les Mis medley made me applaud the cast’s serious talents even as I kept chuckling at the dead-on skewering of the musical. Just as excellent is the ensemble number “Ambition,” parodying Fiddler on the Roof. The cast was accompanied to perfection by pianist and music director Kurt Perry, and special note must be paid to “wig stylist” Stephen Joshua Thompson, without whom the sight gags wouldn’t have achieved their pop.
The ancient Greeks stated that the comedic playwright gives a barb-wire enema to hypocrites. (It sounds better in the original Greek). Freud wrote that humor was a path to the truth. (It sounds more profound in the original Freud). But Forbidden Broadway: Greatest Hits, Vol. 1 sounds better than the originals it mocks, mimics, and manhandles, even pulling off that Chaucerian special: apologizing for vulgarly exposing hypocrites, frauds, and the powerful even as you expose, unapologetically, the vulgarity of the powerful, frauds, and hypocrites. Here’s hoping that StageWorks/Hudson doesn’t fail to bring Forbidden Broadway: Greatest Hits, Vol 1 back for a deserved encore, or leap upon the chance to produce Volume 2 as soon as it’s available.
"...the naughty lines we spew!”
Forbidden Broadway
by Gerard Alessandrini. Directed by Billy Kimmel.
Reviewed by J. Peter Bergman
Nine thousand performances after its opening in New York City in 1982, the satirical revue, Forbidden Broadway, is making a regional debut at Stageworks/Hudson this week. This newly licensed version of the show features some of its classic sketches and songs and it is a welcome relief from the earnestness that poses for professional work to have this tongue-in-cheek experience so wonderfully handled by five performers whose mission seems to be to make us laugh while they don’t.
That has always been one of the joys of this show - the cast never breaks up. They can be doing the most outrageous piece and no one cracks a smile that hasn’t been directed, no one laughs, giggles, or chortles unless it is part of the scene.
Executive Artistic Director Laura Margolis has assembled a perfect cast and then stepped back and handed the reins to a man who knows his way around a farcical parody, Billy Kimmel. Kimmel has directed these shows before and acted his way through much of this material also. In Hudson, on a wide and deep stage without much height, he takes his intrepid interpreters on flights of unimaginable fantasy. By the end of the evening I was laughing so hard my throat hurt too much to shout "Bravi!!"
The hilarity begins with the second number, Kander and Ebb’s "Chicago" and continues unabated throughout the entirety of the first act, and then only after the Les Miserable cast - all five of them - to finish out the first half of the evening. And in between the larger ensemble pieces are the set, character study, or character-damaging, solo spots. They are never anything but fun.
Among the best in this regionally produced showcase of talents is the Carol Channing of Molly Walsh. She is outlandishly funny with her badly smeared lipstick mouth, her three red feathers and her wide-eyed, manic looks. She switches faces and voices later on as Liza Minnelli (so manic from too many drugs that she tells the same stories over and over) and also Barbra Streisand (a disaffected diva with a passion for hair-flipping).
Billy Kimmel has his own set of impressions to contend with including a hilariously self-centered Mandy Patinkin. As Patinkin he poses his way through a song that seems to take longer to sing than it took to build the Eiffel Tower. Later, he plays Tevye, the milkman, in an ensemble number called "Ambition" (think about it, then laugh). Kimmel has also staged and directed this show and his work shines in every sketch, in every musical number.
Stephen Thompson is genuinely funny in everything he does here, but his Rafreaky in the Lion King sequence is especially cherished. It was impossible to tell, from his entrance later as a decrepit knight errant, where he was going to land: "Spamalot" or "Man of La Mancha" or some other daft musical about knights trying to walk in their armor, but when we arrive at his destination it turns out the speculation was worth every moment of the wait.
Molly Parker-Meyers is the fourth wheel of equal weight in this company and does a star-turn as Julie Andrews in the "Mama Mia" sequence and as Chita Rivera in the "West Side Story" number "Chita/Rita."
In fact, to single out a single character or scene for any of these four players is truly impossible. They all had resonance and insight and the lyrics truly carry the day. In a season whose early days have brought me face to face with "Hello, Dolly!" "Carousel," and "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat" I sat in the Stageworks audience thinking I could have waited and just enjoyed the humorous take instead.
Kurt Perry is a wonderful at the piano and the costumes designed by Deepsikha Chatterjee were perfect as were the wigs by Stephen Joshua Thompson.
I heard someone ask if this show wasn’t too sophisticated, too "in" for Hudson and for Berkshire region audiences. Judging from the level of laughter it is clear that the answer is "absolutely not." This is a well-chosen entree into Stageworks fifteenth anniversary season.
