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Theatre in Review: Forbidden Broadway: Alive and Kicking (47th Street Theatre)

Marcus Stevens, Jenny Lee Stern, Scott Richard Foster. Photo: Carol Rosegg

Alive and kicking, indeed: After a three year-sabbatical, Gerard Alessandrini's long-running spoof is back with a vengeance, cutting like a buzz saw through the follies of contemporary Broadway. Nothing escapes his withering notice -- not the underwhelming critical reception of Evita, not the sea of red ink that follows each revival of Follies, and certainly not the Jarndyce-vs.-Jarndyce-style legal battles surrounding Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. Citizens of Broadway, beware: Heads will once again roll!

Alessandrini has picked the right moment for his return. A satire needs targets, and, for Forbidden Broadway to reach its maximally lethal status, the necessary elements are (a) serious-minded musicals and (b) stars with obvious mannerisms. Fortunately, the current theatre scene offers plenty of both. As timely as yesterday's Ben Brantley pan, Forbidden Broadway: Alive and Kicking even weighs in on the bizarre staging and design concepts of last month's Shakespeare in the Park revival of Into the Woods. Among other things, Amy Adams, who played the Baker's Wife, is seen struggling with the voluminous wig that all but defined her performance, daintily removing a dead mouse from it while crooning a soulful Sondheim ballad.

And so it goes: A superannuated Annie, clinging to a walker, laments her latest revival. Bono and Julie Taymor engage in a death match over Spider-Man ("the first snuff show"), the Irish rock star informing the director that he will get the musical on "with you or without you." Smash, the much-mocked inside-Broadway television soap, is not spared, with dueling divas Megan Hilty and Katherine McPhee belting a revised version of their signature tune, "Let Me Be Your Star," renamed "Let Me Be Sub-Par." Alessandrini's savaging of the studiedly sensitive Irish musical Once is an instant classic, reducing it to a series of lachrymose ballads with airheaded lyrics, punctuated by bizarre dance breaks and stilted dialogue.

Alessandrini is a true musical theatre fan of the old school -- Alive and Kicking opens with an uproarious spoof of Brigadoon -- and once or twice in the past he has come across as a bit of an old crank, miffed that we no longer dwell in the heyday of Jerry Herman and Angela Lansbury. This time out, however, he seems positively grateful for such a windfall of material. Modern Broadway might be a fallen temple of art -- where Mary Poppins, acting as a Disney spokesperson, croons, "Feed the Burbs;" the cast of Rock of Ages announces, "We've turned the Great White Way into Jersey Shore;" and desperate producers try to pass off Raven Symoné and Nick Jonas as big stars -- but it certainly provides heavenly source material. Or, as Sutton Foster, in Reno Sweeney drag, so succinctly puts it, "Everything Blows."

Once again, Alessandrini and Philip George, his co-director, have assembled a quartet of young talents, all skilled in the fine art of character assassination. (David Caldwell provides stalwart assistance at the piano.) Natalie Charlé Ellis provides authoritative takedowns of Audra McDonald and Kelli O'Hara, but her chef d'oeuvre is Catherine Zeta-Jones, whose breathy, overdramatic rendition of a certain Sondheim ballad, here called "Send in the Hounds," is accompanied by the howls of offstage canines. Scott Richard Foster makes short work of Steve Kazee's heart-on-his-sleeve performance in Once, punctuating his ballads with audible sobs; he also makes a show-stopping appearance as Angelica Huston, in her guise as Smash's martini-hurling producer. Marcus Stevens gleefully spoofs Ricky Martin, his hips threatening to swivel out of control as Evita's narrator, and performs an equally neat hit job on Matthew Broderick's beefy, lead-footed hoofing in Nice Work If You Can Get It. Jenny Lee Stern earns the most notches on her belt as, among others, the soulful Czech heroine played by Cristin Milioti in Once ("My ovaries ache with Eastern European longing."); the director Diane Paulus, taking a pair of shears to the score of Porgy and Bess ("The Gershwins need a little bit of help, so thank God for me!"); and Judy Garland, back from the other side with a thing or two to say about End of the Rainbow ("Thank you, Tracie Bennett, for portraying me in your special way.").

That Forbidden Broadway: Alive and Kicking maintains such a breakneck pace is due in no small part to the contributions of Philip Heckman, the costume designer, who, aided by Bobbie Cliffton Zlotnik, the wig designer, has found a way to keep the cast spinning in and out of elaborate outfits, sometimes with only seconds to spare. Heckman's work is also full of wicked observations about the work of his Broadway colleagues. (Alvin Colt, the golden-era costume designer who contributed to so many editions of Forbidden Broadway, is still represented by the evergreen spoof of The Lion King.) The other design credits, including Megan K. Halpern's scenery, Mark. T. Simpson's lighting, and Sound Associates' sound design are all fine.

If Alessandrini makes effortless fun of the self-important and self-obsessed, he has a slightly harder time with shows that are just for fun. He has a moderately good time mocking the over-caffeinated all-dancing cast of Newsies, and he extracts a few laughs out of Matt Stone and Trey Parker, contemplating the millions they've made by shocking audiences with The Book of Mormon, but neither sketch is a home run, for the simple reason that neither show has any pretensions to puncture. The take-no-prisoners humor of Mormon proves particularly resistant, making clear that you can't satirize a satire.

But, in an evening loaded with so much invigorating laughter, such occasional missteps matter not at all. In the press materials, Alessandrini notes that he and his colleagues have the 47th St. Theatre for a limited period, and, after that, they plan to return "from time to time." Personally, I don't think he should be allowed to stop turning out these brilliant parodies until they cart him off to the Actors Home in Englewood, New Jersey, and maybe not even then. Now in its 30th year, Forbidden Broadway is not only alive and kicking, it is younger than springtime.--David Barbour


(6 September 2012)

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