Forty Years of Loving Broadway by Laughing at It

It’s a small night club; the pianist starts the familiar, too familiar, opening of “Tomorrow” from Annie. It’s not a little girl who steps forward, but a jaded, full-grown woman dressed in the iconographic red dress and sporting an exaggerated curly haired Annie wig. She flicks an ash from her cigarette, and, with her nicotine croak sings: I’m thirty years old, tomorrow/ and I haven’t worked since I played Annie/ when I was ten. Those who laugh and get the joke, but still retain their love for Annie and all things musical theater, are the precise targets for Gerard Alessandrini’s Forbidden Broadway series. For over forty years, Alessandrini’s shows have produced “cabaret revue(s) sharply spoofing show tunes, characters, and plots of contemporary and current Broadway musicals.” Each edition is a singing political cartoon medley that immediately hones in on the characteristics that musical theater fans know, exaggerates them, and incisively exploits them for humor and truth.

The concept started when Alessandrini, then a young, talented, New York City actor, who, like so many young, talented New York City actors, was working at a restaurant. As he stood at the host station, he wrote parody lyrics to famous Broadway songs to entertain the wait staff, who were also talented young New York actors, so they knew the shows and got the jokes. Soon, to go with his restaurant gig and his summer stock-filled resume, Alessandrini had a portfolio of songs which he and a friend decided to use in a cabaret act showcasing their talent. A supper club owner agreed to let him perform the show if Alessandrini could recruit two more actor-singers so that the show would be more revue than cabaret. The premise was simple: in an evening of songs, take well-loved Broadway numbers, change the lyrics, and from a deep place of love, use the series of rewritten tunes to simultaneously poke fun and celebrate Broadway musicals and its artists.

As Alessandrini relates in a 2004 interview, the first few performances were just on the weekends with audiences largely composed of the actors’ friends until Rex Reed, a leading theater reviewer and cultural critic of the time, came to the show. One of the stars mocked in that cabaret was film legend Lauren Bacall, who’d recently appeared in a Broadway show. Reed, reportedly, had a feud with Bacall and loved the show with its plethora of musical theater jokes and its takedown of the Hollywood star. He published a prominent review of the little revue, and Forbidden Broadway, to purposely use a cliché, became one of the hottest tickets in town. It ran for over 2,000 performances. Over the years, leading musical theatre stars and creators have come to see the show and enjoy the imitations of themselves. Forbidden Broadway has spawned twenty-five editions, thirteen cast albums, this writer owns three, legions of fans, and a forty-year-plus run in New York. In 2006, Gerard Alessandrini was given a special Tony Award for Theatre Excellence.

When the Hamilton juggernaut hit Broadway, friends asked Gerard if he was going to put a parody of the Lin-Manuel Miranda hit into Forbidden Broadway. But, to Alessandrini, it was clear that Hamilton, with its infusion of rap and hip hop, was going to literally change the form that he’d celebrated for thirty years. So he struck upon an idea: put Forbidden Broadway inside Hamilton. While doing research on the show’s creator, Alessandrini entered Miranda’s name into his search bar and an explosion of information on Broadway’s wunderkind emerged, “Like spam.” Alessandrini decided to take Hamilton’s music, rewrite lyrics, and tell the story of a fictionalized, vainglorious Miranda who was working hard to create a show to revolutionize Broadway by writing a show about revolutionaries. Thus Spamilton was born.

Alessandrini states that he was nervous when Miranda came to see Spamilton. If he didn’t like it, he could shut it down. Fortunately, Miranda loved it! He gave his blessing, along with taking a royalty cut, lent a laudatory quote to the advertisement, and now Spamilton has been produced all over the U.S. and on London’s West End. Usually led by Alessandrini’s producing partner, the Stages version will be a rare case of a theater producing its own Spamilton. The show is in good hands, the directing team definitely understands the wit, wisecracks, and homages of Forbidden Broadway.