Created, written and directed by Gerard Alessandrini, with musical staging by Gerry McIntyre, FORBIDDEN BROADWAY: Merrily We Stole a Song skewers the latest deluge of Broadway offerings including Hell’s Kitchen, Stereophonic, The Outsiders, The Great Gatsby, Back to the Future, The Wiz, and of course, Merrily We Roll Along. In addition, there will be sendups of Roger Bart, Patti LuPone, Daniel Radcliffe, Ariana DeBose and Jeremy Jordan, among others. This up-to-the-minute version will also poke fun at the 2024 Tony Awards, and will include some of the most popular numbers from Alessandrini’s recent Forbidden Sondheim.
Though Broadway, with its vanities and oddities, is in many ways an easy target, hitting satirical bull’s-eyes is hard. Expecting Alessandrini to be as consistently sharp and catchy as the best musicals he ransacks is unrealistic. Even if the music direction by Fred Barton is, as always, top-notch, the show’s staging is rudimentary, the pacing of its mere 90 minutes erratic and pocked with potholes. As such, it’s probably a good thing that last summer’s planned production of “Forbidden Broadway on Broadway” didn’t work out; the scruffy, sarcastic, bare-bones revues that this franchise is modeled on no longer have a home there.
Maybe it’s not my cocktail. I say this as someone who enjoys parodies, but Merrily We Stole a Song veers into self-congratulatory smugness. It's not that I don’t disagree with its comments on the crisis of Broadway biz leaning on cushy nostalgia and high prices (criticism that isn’t new), but these complaints, seemingly lifted from theatre Twitter, can only roll out so long as lyrics before they dry out.
2024 | Off-Broadway |
Original Off-Broadway Production Off-Broadway |
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