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ON THE RECORD: Wright and Forrest's (and Rachmaninoff's) Anya and Forbidden Broadway Goes Rehab
By Steven Suskin
29 Mar 2009
FORBIDDEN BROADWAY GOES TO REHAB [DRG 12633]
Another opening, another Forbidden Broadway. Or perhaps not; Gerard Alessandrini recently pulled the plug on the series, for now anyway. The recent edition, Forbidden Broadway Goes to Rehab, went to the rehab from which no Off-Broadway musical returns on March 1. Twenty-seven years it's been since Gerard and a few friends gathered around the piano at Palsson's (later known as McGraw's and Triad) and caused a veritable explosion of laughter with a parade of poison-penned parodies. Forbidden Broadway wandered downtown, cross town, and west again, reflecting the hits and flops of the day and adapting to the times; the Broadway times, that is, even in those meager seasons when there seemed to be no Broadway to parody.
The tenth CD in the series brings us the recent Rehab edition, which was perhaps not Forbidden Broadway at its strongest. Even so, the wild humor of Alessandrini and his collaborator Phillip George shines through. The Tale of Two Cities and Xanadu segments are sharp, and the Young Frankenstein sketch is especially droll. Christina Bianco, James Donegan, Gina Kreiezmar and Michael West are the cutups, with David Caldwell as the one-man band at the keyboard.
So farewell Mr. Alessandrini; adieu, finally and permanently, to Forbidden Broadway. Sure. Until the fall of 2010, I expect.
(Steven Suskin is author of "The Sound of Broadway Music: A Book of Orchestrators and Orchestrations" as well as "Second Act Trouble," "Show Tunes" and the "Opening Night on Broadway" books. He can be reached at Ssuskin@aol.com)
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