Audio | 'You Can't Stop the Camp,' from the album 'Forbidden Broadway: Rude Awakening'
Audio | 'Spamalot,' from the album 'Forbidden Broadway: Rude Awakening'
Audio | 'Jersey Goys,' from the album 'Forbidden Broadway: Rude Awakening'
Audio | Gina Kreiezmar spoofs Patti LuPone in 'Gypsy,' from the album 'Forbidden Broadway: Rude Awakening'
IF YOU GO
What:Forbidden Broadway by Gerard AlessandriniWhere: Carnival Studio Theater at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, 1300 Biscayne Blvd., Miami, through April 13When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesday-Friday, 5 and 8 p.m. Saturday, 2 and 5 p.m. SundayCost: $50 Friday, Saturday and Sunday matinee; $45 other showsInfo: 305-949-6722 or www.arshtcenter.orgStrange, isn't it, how wit, musical talent and the simple desire for a job can become the foundations of a showbiz legacy? When Gerard Alessandrini opened a little show called Forbidden Broadway at a New York supper club in 1982, he never dreamed that the ever-evolving revue would still be going strong 26 years later.
Broadway shows come and go. But Alessandrini's brand of satire has endured, skewering shows from Cats to Spring Awakening and personalities from Evita-era Patti LuPone to the new Gypsy-revival version of the incomparable (but not inimitable) LuPone.
Now South Florida has the chance to experience a show that has delighted everyone from Les Miz-besotted tourists to Broadway buffs to Alessandrini's expertly dissected targets (Stephen Sondheim, for instance, keeps coming back for more). Each spring, Forbidden Broadway has to vacate its shared home at Off-Broadway's 47th Street Theatre so that the Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre can present its productions there. So Alessandrini and the Forbidden Broadway gang hit the road, settling in for a spring run in a different city each year. This time, Miami's got 'em.
The show has landed in South Florida in part because one of its producers, Jon B. Platt, worked with Scott Shiller, now interim vice president of the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, when Forbidden Broadway did its spring run in Chicago last year. Shiller, who will present the show in a 250-seat, proscenium-style setup in the center's Carnival Studio Theater, says Alessandrini is 'phenomenal about knowing what to do here. He'll choose from shows that have played here and greatest hits Miamians would know. It's a `best of' Forbidden Broadway.''
Forbidden Broadway officially opens Tuesday and runs through April 13 -- longer, if enough people get tickled by its parodies of Spamalot (which recently played the Arsht Center), Avenue Q (coming to the Arsht in May), Wicked (now at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts) and the like. No one, of course, is more tickled than the 54-year-old Alessandrini, who has been spoofing Broadway since he was 29.
''We did have a notion that we could change as Broadway changed,'' Alessandrini says of his show's beginnings. ``But we didn't have a notion that it would be this many years.''
WAITING FOR BREAK
Alessandrini, a graduate of the Boston Conservatory of Music, was appearing in out-of-town productions (including parts at Florida dinner theaters) and working as a waiter at Lincoln Center, waiting for his own Broadway break, when a friend suggested he try out some of his parody songs at a piano bar. He did, and in January 1982, Forbidden Broadway was born.
Having written parody lyrics since he was a kid, Alessandrini approaches a real Broadway show in a specific way -- and not as fodder for satire.
''I see a show to enjoy it. Or not,'' he says. ``I'm not really thinking about how to spoof it. I listen to gossip, to breakfast conversations. I hear what people are saying about a show. I might come up with a joke first, or a point of view. Then I write a parody song. I twist words around or leave some of them there. If you know the [real] song, it's funnier.''
The most recent New York edition of Forbidden Broadway is subtitled Rude Awakening, a nod to last season's sex-drenched, Tony-winning musical Spring Awakening. You can hear Alessandrini's spoofs of that show, ex-Miamian Raúl Esparza's star turn in Company, Tony winner Christine Ebersole in Grey Gardens, David Hyde Pierce in Curtains and Christina Applegate's mishap-plagued run in the Sweet Charity revival on the new Forbidden Broadway: Rude Awakening cast CD, but don't count on seeing those numbers in Miami. The reason? As Shiller suggested, Alessandrini wants the audience to be familiar with what he's spoofing, and those shows are either closed or haven't hit South Florida yet.
''We'll do a mixture of old and new,'' he says. ``Les Misérables, Phantom of the Opera, Wicked, Spamalot, The Little Mermaid, some Ethel Merman and Liza Minnelli.''
And some Patti LuPone. In Forbidden Broadway, LuPone is played by Gina Kreiezmar, the daughter of Cuban-American parents and a University of Miami grad with a bachelor's degree in music. She and the other cast members at the Arsht -- Janet Dickinson, Jared Bradshaw and Michael West -- all sing on the Rude Awakening CD, including a ''hidden'' track featuring Kreiezmar and Alessandrini seemingly improvising a song about LuPone in Gypsy. (''That's totally not true [that we made it up on the spot],'' says Alessandrini. ``Gina's specialty is Patti.'')
THE UNDERSTUDY
By choice, Kreiezmar works as the understudy for the show's two female performers in New York. She and her actor husband Robert Goodman -- she was a student at North Miami Beach Senior High, and he was her ''cute'' substitute teacher, though they didn't start dating until they met again as adults in New York -- are raising their 11-year-old son Max, and Kreiezmar doesn't want to be working six nights a week. But that plan also means that the actress, who has been with Forbidden Broadway since 1992, has to keep learning the evolving multiple roles that two actors usually handle:
''It's a true Sybil situation,'' she says with a laugh.
Kreiezmar, who also plays Merman and Minnelli (``all the belters''), researches the targets of her vocal satire in a variety of ways.
'Sometimes I watch old movies, or I `second act' a show [go into a theater with the crowd after intermission],'' she says. ``But YouTube is the best!''
Wigs and the quick-change costumes -- the work of 92-year-old Tony-winning costume designer Alvin Colt -- help enormously. So does Alessandrini's deft way with lyrics.
''Gerard gives us such a great product,'' Kreiezmar says. ``He's phenomenal at perfectly scanning the parody. Every word fits in with the notes.''
Bradshaw, one of the two guys in the Miami cast, also has South Florida roots. His father Jim was youth minister at Miami's Central Baptist Church in the mid-to-late '70s, and the actor has fond memories of swimming in Coral Gables' Venetian Pool. Everyone connected with the show, he says, is thrilled that this year's spring ''break'' is in a real vacation destination.
The actor underscores a truth about the spoofing done in Forbidden Broadway when he observes, ''We all wish we were in these shows.'' And a number of successful performers -- Seinfeld's Jason Alexander, Barbara Walsh (in the recent Company revival), Brad Oscar (cracked playwright Franz Liebkind in The Producers), Dee Hoty (The Will Rogers Follies), Davis Gaines (a longtime Broadway Phantom) -- are Forbidden Broadway veterans who wound up on the spoof-worthy Great White Way.
It is no small thing to be able to sing like someone else. Or like many other performers. Bradshaw tries to ''give the essence'' of another actor's sound. He suggests Esparza by ''latching onto his fast vibrato,'' Hyde Pierce by coming up with ''a Boston, swallowed sound.'' And he's not afraid to have the targets of his comic impressions in the audience.
''Before we left New York, I wrote to David Hyde Pierce and invited him to see the show,'' Bradshaw says. ``He called my cellphone and came. He said it's touching, a tribute to the old days and current Broadway.''
HE'S THE LINK
Colt, the costume designer, is a connection between Broadway past and present, between the big-budget designs one can create for the pinnacle of commercial theater and the clever knockoffs that serve an Off-Broadway revue. He got his start on Broadway creating the costumes for On the Town -- in 1944. And, thanks to Forbidden Broadway, he's still having a blast.
''I try to see the shows they want to make fun of,'' he says. 'I couldn't get anyone to go to Chitty Chitty Bang Bang with me. . . . But I had a great time. I loved a lot about it. The [show's flying] car was sensational. It went right over my head. So I thought, `I guess it's showgirl time.' ''
For that parody, Colt gave a cast member ''plastic wings, a horn, spotlights on each boob.'' For Spamalot, his King Arthur wears a crown made from cans of Spam.
''I've never shopped for a show's costumes at the grocery store before,'' Colt says with a chuckle.
In 2006, almost a quarter century after Alessandrini turned his gift for writing parody songs into gold, he was awarded a special Tony Honor for Excellence. And if that was a bit of Broadway's feeding the hand that bites it, so be it. The targets of Alessandrini's withering, amusing commentary know he kids Broadway because he loves it.
