“No matter how excellent a show is,” says Gerard Alessandrini, creator of the
hit New York musical revue Forbidden Broadway, “you can always find
something wrong with it.” That has been a lucrative principle for
Alessandrini, who first took to parodying musicals when he was a struggling
actor in the early 1980s. Back then, Forbidden Broadway was a
nightclub act, an in-joke lionised by the very stars - Stephen Sondheim,
Ethel Merman, Hal Prince - it sent up. It then ran for 27 years
off-Broadway, evolving all the time, a musical revue-cum-standards watchdog,
mercilessly ribbing theatreland's egos, excesses and inadequacies.
But even excellent shows have something wrong with them, and Forbidden
Broadway's Achilles heel is right here. On two occasions this Great
White Way institution has crossed the pond to take on the West End but it
has yet to emulate its Stateside success. Now its creators are hoping for
third time lucky. “Over the past ten years,” says Alessandrini, “the West
End and Broadway have become much more alike.” According to David Babani,
the producer who staged the show's first West End run a decade ago and now
revives it at his own venue, the Menier Chocolate Factory, “a higher
percentage of the audience will be clued up on what's happening on both
sides of the Atlantic. It's a good time to revive the show.”
Not that Forbidden Broadway requires great foreknowledge. To judge from
the rehearsal I attend, the jokes are broad enough to make the uninitiated
feel at home. There is a reworking of All That Jazz (from Chicago)
about gossip, fandom and internet chatrooms (“And I hear/ Jude Law is
queer”). The cast are braced to incorporate new material throughout the run.
“If Susan Boyle gets the lead in The Lion King, we'll stick her
in,” says performer (and recent Chicago star) Anna-Jane Casey.
For now, there are topical sideswipes at Spring Awakening and Daniel
Radcliffe in Equus, and a ruthless Jersey Boys rip-off
spoofing that show's helium-voiced performances and by-numbers narrative.
Alessandrini is no fan of what he calls “theme park” musicals that “spend
more money than Fort Knox/ And steal a score from some jukebox/ Then end up
with a pale Xerox/ And fail.”
The history of Forbidden Broadway, according to Phillip George, its
director since 1987, is a history of Broadway itself. When he started
working on the show, “the lions were on their last legs. Ethel Merman, Carol
Channing, Richard Rodgers: when our show opened, those people were in the
audience - and they were the ones we were celebrating”. As musical theatre
evolved, so too did Forbidden Broadway, which updated itself
regularly to chronicle “the British invasion” (Lloyd Webber and Les
Mis), then the rebirth of American musical comedy, right up to “the
current wave, which is famous film comedies from the Eighties and Nineties
turned into musicals. And five years from now they'll be doing something
else.”
The Forbidden Broadway team doesn't discriminate: if a show is making a
noise on Broadway, they will take the mickey out of it. “Sometimes I like a
show a lot,” says Alessandrini, “and I have to find something weak about it.
Sometimes we have to spoof a show that I don't like at all and would prefer
never having to think about again.” On those occasions, he grits his teeth
and gets on with his job - which is rewriting the lyrics of the most famous
tunes in each show to reflect “my opinion not only of the production but of
the hype surrounding it: what people are saying, how a show has been
presented, whether a star actor has left or arrived.”
It is that pomp and ceremony that qualifies musical theatre for ridicule, says
Phillip George. “Musical theatre is a big form. It's reality with a 30-piece
orchestra. To be able to do that stuff eight times a week is bound to do
something to your ego. It's easy to see how someone becomes Patti LuPone.”
LuPone, the Broadway diva, has been lampooned relentlessly by the show - but Forbidden
Broadway's targets seldom take offence. “It's hard to get it right all
the time,” says George, “and there have been instances when people got angry
at what we did.” But there are also those who crave harsher punishment.
“Sondheim always sends messages to Gerard saying, 'Be meaner!' He wants to
be eviscerated. When he comes to see us, he kills himself laughing.”
“I'd be interested to see what somebody would do with Forbidden
Broadway if they hated Broadway. But we don't hate it,” says George.
“This show is a love letter written with poison ink.” And Alessandrini,
according to The New York Times, is “New York theatre's favourite
practitioner of tough love”. The love part is important - Alessandrini is a
musicals connoisseur and a frustrated serious lyricist. “It has been nice to
have steady work,” he says, referring to his 27-year success, “but I still
have that urge to write real things and Forbidden Broadway got in the
way of that.” Now that the New York run is over, he is turning to
non-satirical projects. So could a future version of the show find
Alessandrini spoofing his own Broadway hits? “Wouldn't that be fun? I hope I
can think of as nasty things to say about myself as I can about Patti LuPone
or Billy Elliott.”
But first, there is a UK run to deal with. London has proved a tough nut to
crack, says Babani, mainly for structural reasons. In New York, Forbidden
Broadway's run was in a 100-seat Off-Broadway theatre, whereas “I can't name
a single theatre in London with a hundred seats that is set up to have a
long-running success. It doesn't make sense in terms of what we can pay our
actors.” The show's US success was also sustained by Broadway's high
turnover of shows, which provided constant fresh ammunition. “We simply
don't have that turnover of material,” says Babani.
But he is still buoyant at the prospects for this new, UK-friendly Forbidden
Broadway - so buoyant, indeed, that he can force a smile when George
discusses his favourite new number in the show: a spoof of Babani's own
production of Sondheim's A Little Night Music. “The last time I went
to see it,” says George, “the audience was less than full. Now, this is an
artful production by Trevor Nunn, a top musical-theatre director, and it
should be sold out by now. But it isn't. So in our show, its most famous
song becomes Send in the Crowds.” Babani winces. “I think it's the
meanest number in the show,” he says. “But if we're going to poke fun at
everybody else, we have to poke fun at ourselves. That's all part of the fun
of it.”
Forbidden Broadway is previewing at the Menier Chocolate Factory
(020-7907 7060). It opens on July 2.
