For more than four decades, “Forbidden Broadway” has lovingly mocked the songs, stories and stars of Broadway from afar — in performance spaces at bars or diners as well as in theaters in New York and beyond.
This summer, the show will for the first time be staged in the belly of the beast: on Broadway. A version of the long-running, oft-altered revue, now titled “Forbidden Broadway on Broadway: Merrily We Stole a Song,” is planning to begin previews July 29 and to open Aug. 15 at the Hayes Theater.
“Everything else is getting bigger, so why not ‘Forbidden Broadway’?” said Gerard Alessandrini, the show’s creator and author. “I haven’t done a whole new edition of ‘Forbidden Broadway’ since before Covid, so I thought this would be a good time to come back — we need to laugh more, and with all the activity on Broadway, there will be plenty of good targets.”
“Forbidden Broadway” is a satirical production, consisting mostly of melodies from well-known or currently running shows, rewritten with lyrics that mock something about the production or its artists. The audience’s basic familiarity with the material is crucial, so the show’s targets are often rotated to reflect whatever is most in the public eye.
“Going to a ‘Forbidden Broadway’ is for me like sitting down and schmoozing with a friend who shares an obsession,” the critic Ben Brantley wrote in The New York Times in 2019.
The show has had some near-death experiences, but, at least so far, each hiatus has been followed by rewriting and rebirth.
The subtitle of the Broadway version is a confession as well as an allusion to one of the season’s biggest hits, “Merrily We Roll Along,” which has a score by Stephen Sondheim. “Forbidden Broadway” has long parodied Sondheim works, and this iteration is expected to spoof not only “Merrily,” but also several other classics by the great composer, including “Sweeney Todd,” “Into the Woods” and “Company.” That doesn’t mean this season’s other offerings will be spared — a news release cites as possible examples “Hell’s Kitchen,” “The Great Gatsby,” “Back to the Future,” “The Notebook” and “Water for Elephants.”
The plans to bring “Forbidden Broadway” to the big stage were previously reported by the newsletter Broadway Journal. The production, with four actors, a pianist and rotating guest stars, will be directed by Alessandrini, who created “Forbidden Broadway” in 1982. The producers are Broadway & Beyond Theatricals (Ryan Bogner, Victoria Lang and Tracey Stroock McFarland) in association with John Freedson and Harriet Yellin.
