A Conversation with Gerard Alessandrini
We speak to the creator of Forbidden Broadway about Merrily We Stole a Song
Forbidden Broadway, which has been ribbing the Great White Way since 1982, makes a triumphant return to New York City this month with its latest show, Merrily We Stole a Song. Ahead of this latest (Sondheim-filled, naturally) production, I had the pleasure of speaking to none other than the creator of Forbidden Broadway himself, Gerard Alessandrini. Previews for Merrily We Stole a Song begin on August 30, and you can find out more by clicking here. Our conversation begins below:
I’ve been such a huge fan of Forbidden Broadway for so long. For people who might be less familiar, how do you tend to sum it up?
The words spoof or parody certainly apply. Musical comedy revue applies. Hopefully it's something out of the ordinary in that category, but at its heart it's a musical comedy revue. There’s basically no book, but thematically it's all linked by what's happening in theater in New York and London. That's the best I can describe it and still remain somewhat humble.
And your latest show, Merrily We Stole a Song, opens this month for previews and then officially in September. What is it that you're most excited about with this particular show, and perhaps that you feel like you haven't done before?
Well, the first time we did Forbidden Broadway back in the fall of 1981, just before our opening in 1982, Merrily We Roll Along was the talk of the town. It was not received well, but everybody was talking about it. It had great expectations because of Sondheim and Hal Prince. But Forbidden Broadway actually did better that year than Merrily We Roll Along itself. We had a very talented original cast. And our first poster was a spoof of the poster of Merrily We Roll Along—but of course the whole show wasn't just Merrily. We we did all the Broadway shows: Evita, Pirates of Penzance, Amadeus. All of those shows back then. But it did have a kindred feel to Merrily We Roll Along, because it was young people thumbing their noses at Broadway, and Merrily originally was cast as young people too, of course.
So this year it seems like we've come full circle, because finally Merrily was accepted as a solid hit on Broadway, and also because of Sondheim’s passing a couple of years ago. There seemed to be a void in Broadway creativity because he was gone. It did seem like that… but he certainly left us with lots of great shows to do. So I thought it would be a good idea initially to make our show about all his shows and to use spoofs of all his songs, of which I had many over the years. And because of the connection to Merrily We Roll Along, I called it Merrily We Stole a Song. Now, it's morphed somewhat since we did that last summer. Last summer, we actually called the show Forbidden Sondheim, and it was all Sondheim parodies. There weren’t any parodies of Dreamgirls or Cats or anything like that. It was all Sondheim songs and his stars. And in a way, it told the history of him on Broadway, because we presented it semi-chronologically. One of the first numbers was Ethel Merman in Gypsy, and we went right up to Here We Are, the new Sondheim musical that premiered last year. And it had a thrust to it that I liked very much. But when we wanted to mount a full production of Forbidden Broadway for this season, spoofing this season on Broadway, I thought, well, it needs to be a little more inclusive than just Sondheim parodies. We have so many shows on Broadway this year—musicals and plays—that were very worth spoofing, like The Outsiders, Suffs, Hell's Kitchen and all that. I felt like we needed to include those too. So the Sondheim subtitle went away, but I kept Merrily We Stole a Song, because of course the big hit of the season was the revival of Merrily We Roll Along—so I’m sort of having my cake and eating it too. We still have a lot of Sondheim parodies in the show, because they've been doing these shows again on Broadway. They did Sweeney Todd last year. Before that, there was Company, there was Into the Woods, so even just by doing a grand selection of what’s been on Broadway in the last few years, it includes many Sondheim parodies.
I know that you’re taking inspiration not just from shows but from particular performers as well, like Patti LuPone, Daniel Radcliffe, Ariana DeBose… How do you approach those? I’d imagine it’s a real badge of honor at this point to be parodied in a Forbidden Broadway show as a performer.
In yesteryear, in the first years of Forbidden Broadway, a lot of stars did take it as a badge of honor, and they would all come to the show. We had people like Mary Martin, Ethel Merman, Rex Harrison. The younger generation doesn't always have as much of a self-referential comedy look at themselves, so with Ariana DeBose or Ben Platt, I'm looking at these parodies of them and I’m thinking, I bet you they don't want to see them! I also think that originally Forbidden Broadway attracted a lot of the stars to see the show because a lot of these stars were just happy to be mentioned. Like I mentioned before, Mary Martin and Ethel Merman, their heyday was over, so I think they were happy to be included in a show that also spoofed Cats and Dreamgirls—which were the new shows back then. I don't know if that's true nowadays. Shows turn over fast. Stars come and go quickly. Stars don't have a multitude of vehicles, and they have one or two hits, but not like the old stars who had many hit plays and musicals over the years. They just got to work more, because there were more shows. That's changed a little bit… So, you’ll have to ask them if it's a badge of honor!
And I’d love to know more about Sondheim’s own interactions with Forbidden Broadway throughout his life. Did he welcome that sort of parody right from the beginning?
Yeah, very much so. First of all, like I said, when we first did the show, we used the Merrily We Roll Along poster. But because the show had closed, I really didn't have a spoof of Merrily We Roll Along itself. And I think Hal Prince came to the show because at first he was concerned that we may have been saying nasty things about that particular show. And then Sondheim came a week later, so I think he got the news from Hal Prince that it was okay, that we didn't say nasty things about Merrily We Roll Along—that actually we said nice things about Stephen Sondheim and Hal Prince. So, early on he came to the show, and in a way he gave it his stamp of approval just by coming there and being seen laughing at it. And then for Sondheim it became something of a New York thing to do. He would come about once a year, maybe twice a year sometimes, to see the show, and he would bring friends. And I think he mostly enjoyed it! I think as the years went on and I had to write more and more numbers, I think he would have liked to give me some suggestions. This is looking back now. I don't think I realized at the time. And I would have liked the suggestions and I would have taken some, except that I didn't want to bother the great man and I wanted him to write more real music for all of us! So looking back, I think I should have taken more suggestions from him. Later, because we're talking about a period of almost 40 years, he would just go ahead and say things like, “What did you do that for? Why don't you do this?” And sometimes he would say things that were really funny. I remember he was talking about a spoof I had of a Disney musical, and he said, “Oh, you should have set it in Disney hell.” And I laughed, and I put to him, “Oh, maybe you should have been writing Forbidden Broadway all these years.” His eyebrows went up, as if to say, “Yeah. I wish I could have. I would have done a funnier job.” I don't think he would have gotten away with saying nasty things about stars that were his friends and things like that. But he did seem to enjoy it!
And we always had so many Sondheim spoofs in the show, because it's always great to spoof a serious show, and his shows had a lot of great stars too. When he passed away, I realized, oh, I must have about 60 Sondheim spoofs that we did over the years. Some of them we dropped, and when we dropped a spoof, he'd want to see it anyway. He'd come to the show and I'd have to do it anyway for him, like parody on-demand. And he could see why it wasn't in the show anymore, because it wasn't funny. But I had so many Sondheim spoofs that when he passed away, I thought that I should take all the best ones and put them into one show. And that was the basis for Forbidden Sondheim.
And from your point of view, as the person who is writing these spoofs, there must be specific things in his musical and dramatic language that you latch onto. Are are you able to articulate what some of those signature things are that you most respond to, and can therefore send up in that way?
Yeah. It’s often the actual form of the song itself. In other words, his forms are very tight and his lines are very tight. You can't do it any other way. You really have to stick to what he's doing. I'm definitely using his rhyme scheme. And there are different levels. I can get very insular, so if you're a Sondheim expert, you'll hear the joke or you'll hear the twist of what I did. But on the other hand, there's something that also needs to be very surface, which is the cliché things that people would say about Sondheim, like, “He's very intellectual,” or, “His shows don't make any money.” So yeah, I would definitely use that once in a while. If you were a Sondheim fan and you came to a Forbidden Broadway, especially the last one, if you were a fan and you knew his lyrics, I have a lot of inside twists and turns on his real lyrics that you would often have to know the real lyrics to get the joke that I did.
So I'm working on different levels. I'm working on a more surface level so that casual theatergoers can appreciate it. But I'm also working on another level, which is if you've got all your great musical theater pieces memorized, you'll get it on another level. And this is true of all of Forbidden Broadway. And there's even another level. There's the level of even if you don't understand music theater at all, I've got to make the show entertaining as a revue. The singers have to be good. The music has to be good. The costumes have to be colorful. The wigs have to be funny. Children love it for that reason. They're glad to see the costume changes. They don't know quite what's going on. But with Sondheim, I always love doing his material because it is so well-written. It's very clear what he's getting at, or what his point of view is. So if I just turn that upside down or inside out, I'm halfway there. And then, like I said, I do appreciate knowing what the rhyme scheme is. Sometimes when I spoof a contemporary hit song, it’s more difficult. There was one I was doing today, and one line ended with “choice,” and later it ended with “chance.” And my husband looked at me and said, “Do you think they meant that to rhyme?” And I said, “Yeah, I do, actually.” So I'll try to fix it. But with Sondheim, there was never any need for that. It’s always so clear. And then with Sondheim, you've got to scan it completely correctly, because that’s what he always did faultlessly.
I'd love to ask about Spamilton too, because it felt to me like you were responding not just to Hamilton itself, but to the cultural moment that surrounded it. And there were already so many parody videos and memes popping up around that particular show… How did you find your own way into sending it up?
Well, when Hamilton popped up—and I’m so grateful that it did—my first thought was, oh, should we do a big Hamilton spoof within Forbidden Broadway? And then I thought, oh no, it deserves its own spoof. Because since I have been in New York, which is close to 50 years, I've never seen a show that was that big of a hit. By the time I got to New York, maybe it was A Chorus Line, maybe it was My Fair Lady, but it was even bigger than Cats had been. It was such a cultural happening. And what it did, and this is what I hope to do with the show, was it shone a different light on everything that was on Broadway and in the contemporary theater scene. It made some of the classic stars like Patti LuPone and Bernadette think, well, now what are we going to do? There were other shows that we all thought were so funny and brilliant. And you thought, well, not as brilliant as Hamilton was… It really made all of Broadway shine or not shine in a different light, so it really shifted the bar in musical theater. And as you know, it has been quite low over the years.
Also, Lin-Manuel himself... I could hear in the Hamilton text his enormous palette of knowledge. You could hear when he was accessing Mozart or even Rodgers and Hammerstein or Hoagy Carmichael. I could hear all that, so we had a great palette to choose from. So Spamilton came out very varied and colorful. And with other shows, the songwriting can be brilliant, but there’s a sameness to it. You can hear that the author has a particular style and they know what they're doing, and they do it well, but it's not a very large color palette. But I could see how good Lin-Manuel was—and I think Sondheim could too. And it was fun! I could put a little more stuff in there. I could put a little bit of Rodgers and Hammerstein in there. I could unveil what he was doing with that. And I think it needed a whole show. So instead of doing a Hamilton spoof in a new Forbidden Broadway, I did a spoof of Hamilton with a little Forbidden Broadway mixed in.
But we're all still in this post-Sondheim era. The big show this year, obviously, was Merrily We Roll Along. I mean, the last weekend tickets were $1800. Last year, Sweeney Todd was a hard ticket. Before that, Into the Woods and Company, and and now they're going to do Old Friends on Broadway and they just did a concert version of Follies at Carnegie Hall and those A Little Night Music evenings at Lincoln Center. So there's an avalanche of Sondheim, and I think that comes from the fact that when you do go to some contemporary shows, you realize, oh, this isn’t as good as Sondheim. As a matter of fact, when we were spoofing the new shows for our new edition that we're about to do, a lot of them are really great, but there can be a sameness to it. The music has a sameness to it. The chords, structure, harmony. The songs wander. They don't always actually have much structure.
In this show, we have a spoof of Back to the Future, which I like very much. It's a fabulous theme park show. We're spoofing it, and so I put in this little subplot where Roger Bart and Casey Likes go back in time and they run into a young Stephen Sondheim on the way to study with Oscar Hammerstein. But he's been impressed by their car, and they take him for a ride, and he forgets about going to meet with Oscar Hammerstein and becomes interested in developing cars. And then Roger Bart and Casey Likes go into the future, and they say, “What's wrong with Broadway? Look at all these shows. It's like Sondheim had never existed.” And they say, “Oh my gosh, we changed Broadway. We took Sondheim out of musical theatre. We’ve got to go back and make sure he makes that appointment with Oscar Hammerstein to become the Sondheim that we all know and love.” So they go back in time to fix it, to get Sondheim to go meet with Oscar Hammerstein. And then at the end, Sondheim says, “Oh, okay. All right. I'll go back and learn to write musicals. Can you take me into the future so I can see my musicals?” And that sets up a whole section where you see our spoofs of the recent Sondheim shows: Company, Into the Woods, Merrily, and Sweeney Todd. So although this show may not be called Forbidden Sondheim, so much of it still very much is that.
Forbidden Broadway: Merrily We Stole a Song begins previews on August 30. Tickets for all previews are $30, and you can find more information and buy tickets by clicking here.