Forbidden Broadway: Behind the Mylar Curtain (75 page)

Ed Staudenmayer and Bryan Batt leap for joy
as they cry, "Shut Footloose!"

And that's when Forbidden Broadway began to become
very tourist-friendly. For years, we had been sort of an "insider" show. Of course, we had always had some tourists in the
audience, but it was mostly people with some connection to
the theater. When we did Forbidden Broadway Strikes Back!,
we got such great reviews that tourists began to come to the
show in much greater numbers-and it stayed that way from
then on. Which is why, fortunately or unfortunately, we still
do the Annie number ("I'm thirty years old tomorrow") and
it still brings the house down.

I think the fact that we ramped tip the show with Alvin
Colt's costumes also helped us appeal to tourists. His creations made such an effect that you didn't necessarily have
to get the show on all levels in order to enjoy it. I remember
watching the movie parodies on The Carol Burnett Show
when I was a kid. I certainly didn't catch all the referencesI didn't see most of those movies till many years later-but I was still doubled over
in laughter because Bob Mackie's costumes looked so funny. That's what Alvin did
for us.

We played Forbidden Broadway Strikes Back! very successfully at Ellen's in '97, and
then we started planning a new edition. That's when Giuliani really started to clean up
the theater district at an amazing rate: The porno places were all closing, Disney was
gaining ground with Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King, the whole area was very
quickly becoming gentrified. It was almost too much,
too fast. The funny thing is, we were still getting shows
that were very adult-like the revival of Cabaret, which
was pretty filthy, and The Beauty Queen of Leenane.
The idea behind Forbidden Broadway Cleans Up Its Act
was, "We're gonna clean up, too!" Of course, the joke
was that we were edgier and meaner than ever.

Bryan Batt, Kristine Zbornik, Lori Hammel, and
Ed Staudenmayer are Von Trapped in The Sound
of Music. It has always been a point of pride that
Forbidden Broadway never descended to camp, as
this picture proves.

We still had to be careful about audience recognition of the shows we were spoofing. I remember that
when we first took a shot at Ragtime, our number got
only a few laughs. We kept it in and, about a month
or so later, it started to get more laughs. Two or three
months later, it was bringing the house down. Again,
people needed time to see the actual show in order for
our spoof to be funny. We parodied The Lion King, and
Alvin's costumes really made that number. Also Swan
Lake. Although Footloose was a flop, it ran about a year,
so we were able to do that one, too.

Chicago had opened a month before Strikes Back!,
but it took me some time to figure out what was funny
about it. As it turned out, that show was perfect for
Cleans Up Its Act.

What else? We spoofed the production of Follies
with Ann Miller at Paper Mill. Sunset Boulevard closed,
so we had Andrew Lloyd Webber singing "Memory."
Jekyll and Hyde was another show of questionable
quality that ran for a while; we loved eviscerating that
one. And it was fun to make fun of Bernadette Peters
in Annie Get Your Gun-but not as much fun as we had a year later, when Cheryl
Ladd went into the show.

There were so many new shows in the late '90s that we didn't always have to do
Phantom and Les Miz. There were times when those parodies weren't in Forbidden
Broadway at all. When we did revisit Les Miz, I wrote a new lyric called "Ten Years
More," because I couldn't believe how long the show had run. The Phantom came back
when we did a number about Merman trying to teach him how to project without a
microphone. I loved that because it wasn't about a star being too old or singing flat; it was about the issue of sound amplification on Broadway, which is certainly
still relevant.

Left: Bryan, Donna, and Ed in our version of Chicago. Right: Christine
Pedi as Ethel Merman tells Bill Selby as the Phantom, "You don't need
amplifyin'!"

We were lucky to have extremely
gifted cast members at that time: Ed
Staudenmayer, Christine Pedi, Lori
Hammel. Bryan Batt was still in the
show, and I think many people would
agree that he was one of our greatest
talents. Bryan definitely had that Forbidden Broadway sensibility; he always
knew exactly what was funny about a
show or a star, and he was always willing to go for the jugular.

Bryan was a great collaborator. I think he suggested the Mandy
Patinkin/Mamaloshen number, and I
remember he had the idea to do Rafiki
in The Lion King as "Rafreaky." He was
also responsible for one of the funniest
lyrics we ever had in the show. In my
original parody of "Bring Him Home"
from Les Miz, I had Jean Valjean sing
"Pity me, change the key," and then
he sang, "Take it down, take it down!"
Bryan was auditioning for us with that
number, and he didn't quite remember
the lyrics, so he sang "Bring it down,
bring it down!" That was perfect, because it was closer to the original lyric
and also much funnier. I thought, "How
did I miss that?" Anyway, we put it and
him right into the show.

Charges that Forbidden Broadway has a gay sensibility are
completely unfounded. Here are Ed and Bryan in our take on
Swan Lake.

As we approached the millennium,
Times Square was changing drastically. I think we all had assumed it would
keep at least some of its character, but it was rapidly turning into a mall or a theme
park-especially when Madame Tussauds opened. We did a new edition of the show
called Forbidden Broadway 2001: A Spoof Odyssey, but honestly, I think it was a little
too soon after the previous edition.

Left: Danny Gurwin, Felicia Finley, and Tony Nation in Forbidden
Broadway 2001:A Spoof Odyssey. Right: In 2001, Christine Pedi and
Danny Gurwin spoofed Elton John's Aida while Verdi turned'round in
his grave.

The shows that were big then, like
Aida and the revival of Kiss Me, Kate,
seem unimportant in retrospect. Miss
Saigon closed, but nobody seemed to
care. Saturday Night Fever ran for a
while, so we were able to go after that
one, but my parody wasn't terribly
clever. Broadway was still thriving because shows like Rent, The Lion King,
Les Miz, and Phantom were still going
strong, but we didn't have a lot of new
material to work with at the turn of the
century.

Our most topical number was "Let's
Ruin Times Square Again," the idea being that we should bring back some of
the old grittiness and sleaze of the theater district. Fortunately, we had great
people like Felicia Finley and Danny
Gurwin in the show, and they really boosted whatever material I gave them. But now that
I look back on it, the end of the '90s was the end of an era for Forbidden Broadway.

"A Jolly Holiday with Rudy"

ACTOR AS EMCEE

(Before he can go any fiirther, a whistle blows from the
back of the room. RUDOLPH GIULIANI enters.]

GIULIANI

Stop right there! That lyric is polluted and the staging
is obscene. I order you to stop immediately!

(ACTOR drops EMCEE character.]

ACTOR

lust a minute, please! Who are you?