There’s nothing better than Forbidden Broadway pistol-whipping the theater. It’s been 25 years since writer/creator Gerard Alessandrini first launched his poison-tipped parodies at the dramatic dartboard, and his latest edition, “Rude Awakening,” offers moments as salty and savage as anything he has written. Just 30 seconds in, Valerie Fagan, in a white nightshirt and little else, gives us Spring Awakening’s nubile heroine Wendla: “Mama who bore me/Mama my booby/I need a training bra/And a maxi pad so bad/Mama, please give me sex education/No sleep in heaven for a horny undergrad.”
Now, I’m not someone who believes everything has to be examined, dissected and interpreted, yet there’s something in Alessandrini’s writing this time that hinted at some real worry for Broadway behind all that wackiness. Witticisms about “Disney hell” are well-taken, of course, and pretty much expected. With “Slow People” (satirizing David Hyde Pierce in Show People), however, it’s the audience he’s smacking around, and while this also isn’t unfamiliar terrain for him, it does become something of a relentless theme. When Fagan, now playing Eponine in Les Misérables, sings “On My Phone,” the point is clear: Those goddamn cell phones should be turned off, people, and not just by ticket-buyers, but by actors, too.
Is everything on Broadway quite as bad or bizarre as Alessandrini makes it seem? As he impales his topics with a skewer and sets about his bloodthirsty grilling, it can sometimes seem that way. Jersey Boys fast becomes “Jersey Goys” as two terrific men in the show, Jared Bradshaw and James Donegan, help Fagan sing a rewritten lyric to “Sherry” (“Scary Broadway”) long enough so that it sounds like a lullaby you’d hear in a morgue. Spamalot gets fried like bacon when rhymed with “ham a lot” (saw that coming), and even Tom Stoppard’s epic and philosophical The Coast of Utopia is wrestled back to earth as Donegan, who is particularly good for a guffaw, impersonates actor Brian F. O’Byrne with a long face and a voice like a drone. “In this scene, I have been exiled to the French Riviera,” he mournfully intones. “A horrible place to be if you’re a Socialist.”
Like Broadway, some things work and some things don’t. I loved when Fagan, all dolled up as prickly Mary Poppins, makes an absolute farce out of a familiar tongue-twister of a tune: “It’s stupid-careless-fictional-nonsensical verboseness…” Fagan’s leggy female counterpart, Janet Dickinson, performs acid versions of Christine Ebersole in Grey Gardens, Laura Bell Bundy in Legally Blonde and Beth Leavel in The Drowsy Chaperone (dubbed “The Lousy Chaperone”) so dead-on that each could have lasted longer. The opening of Act II, however, pitting an over-emoting Phantom of the Opera (Donegan) against ever-bombastic Ethel Merman (Fagan), is a little old hat, don’t’cha know, and it seriously lacks a point of view.
“Don’t Monkey with Broadway” is another Act II number in which Bradshaw and Donegan—now as the monkeys in Wicked—beg us not to lay waste to the storied Broadway brand we all supposedly hold so dear. It’s a sentiment to think about as the world goes ape.
Open run. 47th Street Theatre, 304 W. 47th St. (at 8th Ave.), 212-239-6200; $60-$65.
Now, I’m not someone who believes everything has to be examined, dissected and interpreted, yet there’s something in Alessandrini’s writing this time that hinted at some real worry for Broadway behind all that wackiness. Witticisms about “Disney hell” are well-taken, of course, and pretty much expected. With “Slow People” (satirizing David Hyde Pierce in Show People), however, it’s the audience he’s smacking around, and while this also isn’t unfamiliar terrain for him, it does become something of a relentless theme. When Fagan, now playing Eponine in Les Misérables, sings “On My Phone,” the point is clear: Those goddamn cell phones should be turned off, people, and not just by ticket-buyers, but by actors, too.
Is everything on Broadway quite as bad or bizarre as Alessandrini makes it seem? As he impales his topics with a skewer and sets about his bloodthirsty grilling, it can sometimes seem that way. Jersey Boys fast becomes “Jersey Goys” as two terrific men in the show, Jared Bradshaw and James Donegan, help Fagan sing a rewritten lyric to “Sherry” (“Scary Broadway”) long enough so that it sounds like a lullaby you’d hear in a morgue. Spamalot gets fried like bacon when rhymed with “ham a lot” (saw that coming), and even Tom Stoppard’s epic and philosophical The Coast of Utopia is wrestled back to earth as Donegan, who is particularly good for a guffaw, impersonates actor Brian F. O’Byrne with a long face and a voice like a drone. “In this scene, I have been exiled to the French Riviera,” he mournfully intones. “A horrible place to be if you’re a Socialist.”
Like Broadway, some things work and some things don’t. I loved when Fagan, all dolled up as prickly Mary Poppins, makes an absolute farce out of a familiar tongue-twister of a tune: “It’s stupid-careless-fictional-nonsensical verboseness…” Fagan’s leggy female counterpart, Janet Dickinson, performs acid versions of Christine Ebersole in Grey Gardens, Laura Bell Bundy in Legally Blonde and Beth Leavel in The Drowsy Chaperone (dubbed “The Lousy Chaperone”) so dead-on that each could have lasted longer. The opening of Act II, however, pitting an over-emoting Phantom of the Opera (Donegan) against ever-bombastic Ethel Merman (Fagan), is a little old hat, don’t’cha know, and it seriously lacks a point of view.
“Don’t Monkey with Broadway” is another Act II number in which Bradshaw and Donegan—now as the monkeys in Wicked—beg us not to lay waste to the storied Broadway brand we all supposedly hold so dear. It’s a sentiment to think about as the world goes ape.
Open run. 47th Street Theatre, 304 W. 47th St. (at 8th Ave.), 212-239-6200; $60-$65.
