By Lucy Komisar
The performers in Gerard Alessandrini’s “Forbidden Broadway” are routinely as good or better than those they mimic and satirize, and this year’s is no exception.
I hated “Cabaret” on Broadway, but Danny Hayward as Eddie Redmayne, the crude Emcee, and Jenny Lee Stern as Gayle Rankin, the equally crude Sally Bowles in purple underwear, made seeing the original worthwhile. At least because the stinging parody is right on target. Emcee: “I will repulse you (scrunchy mouth), I am a psychopath… a grotesque.”
And Sally: “What good is playing/ This role the ol’ way/ Liza was just o.k.!
Come see my/ Dark deranged display/ Come drag my painted corpse away
When I murder Cabaret!”
Also a bull’s eye was Alicia’s Piano Lesson from “Hell’s Kitchen,” where Nicole Vanessa Ortiz and Jenny Lee Stern show (as I wrote in my review) that the story of Alicia Keys presented by the play – that she was taught to play piano at 17 by a lady in her building – was fake. “I play Alicia Keys and I’m on fire. But we exaggerate and the story is a pho-o-ony… This show’s a big liar.” In fact, Keys was a prodigy who at 15 was signed to a record contract. Ortiz has a terrific soprano.
My other favorite was “The Outsiders,” (Danny Hayward, Jenny Lee Stern and Chris Collins Pisano). Funny, done with country rock and expressive twisting.
“I’m young, and I’m tortured and hot. My angst and self-pity will make you adore the way that I suffer a lot.”
“We try our best to be depressed and mope around the square.” “We’re sensitive and weepy and never wash our hair.”
“Outsiders is our name ‘cuz being poor is cool. We hate the rich kids ‘cuz they’ve got a swimming pool.”
This show gives class politics a bad name! The parody was better than the play.
Also of note, two divas: Jenny Lee Stern as Patti LuPone in “Company,” and Nicole Vanessa Ortiz as Bernadette Peters waiting around for a Sondheim show. Great cabaret sounds.
Stern, wrapped in a white fur, scrunches her face to look like LuPone and sings, “Here’s to the ladies who crunch, Ev’rybody run. Hungry divas chewing the scen’ry for lunch, Eating songs for fun.”
The cast changes “Company” to “Bump-A-Knee, because the latest set was so small the actors could hardly move without bumping into each other. “There’s more, much more changes in store. Your hair is gonna curl (cuz) Bobbi’s a girl!” Bachelor Bobby, whose friends are urging him to find a wife, is now Bobbi, a female, whose friends….you get the idea.
There is more, about “Gatsby,” “Suffs,” and the show’s namesake “Merrily We Roll Along.”
Plus fortunately only a very brief moment for the horrible misogynist show “Oh, Mary” (Chris Collins Pisano in drag.)
Alessandrini regularly announces that the current show is his last. Hope that is a feint.
“Forbidden Broadway, Merrily We Stole a Song.” Written and directed by Gerard Alessandrini. Theater 555, 555 West 42nd Street at 11th Ave., NYC. Runtime 90min. Opened Sept 19, 2024, closes Nov 1, 2024.