Forbidden Broadway Comes Out Swinging!
Opening Night: May 4, 2014
Closing: July 20, 2014
Theater: Davenport Theatre
Just when Broadway thought it was safe from the poison pen of funny-man Gerard Alessandrini, Forbidden Broadway returns, sharper and more hilarious than ever! This year’s targets include Pippin, Kinky Boots, Les Miz, Matilda, joining favorites from last year including Wicked and The Book of Mormon. The fall-down funny musical roast of Broadway that has picked up 9 Drama Desk Awards, a Special Tony®, an Obie, a Lucille Lortel and Drama League Award, is back at last with a blast, features outrageous costumes, hilarious rewrites of the songs you know, and dead-on impressions by a stellar cast.
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May 5, 2014
You don’t need to be a theater maven to laugh yourself silly sometimes during Forbidden Broadway Comes Out Swinging! Everybody will chuckle when a drawling Carrie Underwood — aka “Carrie Underwhelming” — laments her hapless star turn in the live broadcast of The Sound of Music on NBC. Ditto when a mumble-mouthed Sylvester Stallone encourages the actor playing him in Rocky to be less intelligible. Not every joke will make sense to every viewer: Gags about The Bridges of Madison County composer Jason Robert Brown being an egomaniac, a muscle-bound Pippin star Patina Miller, and Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots in Rocky require some knowledge of insider gossip.
READ THE REVIEWMay 4, 2014
Just when the 2013-14 season officially closes with the announcements of awards nominations and when audiences are feeling helplessly besieged by the unusual number of musicals — too many of them less than hoped for — the cavalry charges over the horizon in the persons of satirist Gerard Alessandrini, co-director (with Alessandrini) Phillip George, pianist-conductor David Caldwell and cast members Carter Calvert, Scott Richard Foster, Mia Gentile and Marcus Stevens. Yes, tuner lovers everywhere, Forbidden Broadway Comes Out Swinging! hurtles forth in the nick of time to entertain us at the Davenport with its send-ups–this edition, as all editions, stuffed with laughs and insights into the quirks behind shows received in varying degrees of enthusiasm and regret. (Perhaps more regrets than enthusiasm this year?) And before we go any further in this grateful review, it must be said that in the forefront of Alessandrini’s forces are costume designers Dustin Cross and Philip Heckman and wig designer Bobbie Cliffton Zlotnik. Without their keen observation and humor, it would be impossible for their fearless, peerless leader to advance.
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May 5, 2014
It’s back, and punchier than ever. Gerard Alessandrini’s ever-evolving musical satire, Forbidden Broadway, returns to the Davenport Theatre with Forbidden Broadway Comes Out Swinging! Admittedly, a few of the sketches are swing and miss. Still, you can take comfort in the knowledge that a mildly funny sketch will end within five minutes, making way for something wickedly hysterical. You won’t want to miss this laugh-out-loud revue as it socks it to Idina Menzel, Harvey Fierstein, and, of course, Les Misérables. Forbidden Broadway has long been required viewing for musical-theater aficionados, eager to see how Alessandrini will skewer their favorite (or least favorite) Broadway shows. This iteration is much like the previous 18: David Caldwell bangs out familiar Broadway melodies on piano as four actors perform nearly every role on Broadway.
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May 4, 2014
Anybody who got through this Broadway theater season alive deserves to see Forbidden Broadway Comes Out Swinging! — the latest edition of the irreverent satirical revue that has no scruples and knows no shame. Forget the Tony nominations. Gerard Alessandrini and his clever cohorts have come up with winners in their own special categories of Most Pretentious, Most Ridiculous, Most Expensive, Most Cynical, Most Derivative, and, in their inspired salute to the show they call “More Miserable,” (The World’s) Most Miserable Musical. Making a showy entrance in boxing gloves, the amazingly versatile cast of four, under the pitiless direction of Phillip George and Alessandrini, announce their intention of taking a roundhouse swing at all the big shows that opened this season, from Aladdin to Rocky, while saving a few punches for past favorites like Pippin and “The Book of Morons.”
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May 5, 2014
Every Broadway season gets the Forbidden Broadway it deserves. Nearly each year since 1982, Gerard Alessandrini has fashioned a new edition of his affectionately acid-tongued parodic revue, sending up the Great White Way in comic numbers based on songs from the very shows he’s skewering. The series’s modus operandi is not unlike that of kung fu, in which one is said to use an opponent’s own strength against him. As such, it leaves Alessandrini in the precarious position—a fiddler on the spoof!—of depending on Broadway for material. When shows or stars have strong styles, good or bad, they lend themselves to parody; but they are harder to run down when, like most of this season’s offerings, they are planted in the middle of the road.
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May 6, 2014
It couldn’t have come at a better time — the end of a theater season that just kept on giving. Much like Rocky, one of its hapless targets, Gerard Alessandrini’s Forbidden Broadway Comes Out Swinging! throws plenty of punches — and most of them land. Granted, for this new edition of the long-running musical revue, spoofs of The Bridges of Madison County, Aladdin and NBC’s live broadcast of The Sound of Music practically write themselves. Even so, it’s hard to imagine anyone topping Alessandrini’s wicked satirical take on those shows and many others.
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May 6, 2014
At the end of a long, bleary season on Broadway, a burnt-out case ducks into a hole in the wall off Times Square, looking for a little sympathetic companionship. Soon enough, he finds it in a woman perched on top of a piano, wearing a little beret and an air of infinite jadedness. To the tune of “C’est Magnifique,” she sings a few words, and our guy knows that she understands just how he feels: “Go smoke some crack, ’cause guess what just came back, ooh la la la, ‘Les Misérables.’ ” She’s rueful, amused, resigned and fatalistic in that special way that people are when they’ve been unlucky in love, but keep returning for more. That nameless dame is incarnated by Carter Calvert in Forbidden Broadway Comes Out Swinging!, the seminew revue at the Davenport Theater, and she has a few, highly entertaining friends who share her Rialto-weariness.
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