Current Broadway Production of "Cabaret" A Must-See If You Are Humanby Randi / November 12, 2014
One of the funniest shows in London this fall was not “Urinetown” or “The Book Of Mormon” or, god forbid, “Miss Saigon”, but the show that mocked them all. It was “Forbidden Broadway”, a revue that hilariously, terribly ridicules many of the shows currently playing the West End and had its audiences crying with laughter. Including me. Sadly, it closed yesterday, but its successful and critically beloved run promises the return of future incarnations here.
“Forbidden Broadway” is an NYC off-Broadway institution that has been skewering Broadway shows since 1982. That is before I was even born! Gerard Alessandrini started the riotous, biting revue to mock his beloved musical theatre as only a true fan could do. It’s like how the Comedy Central roasters were so mean (and so funny) the closer they were to the person being roasted. I mean back when they were funny, not in recent years when they roasted like James Franco.
“Forbidden Broadway” is an NYC off-Broadway institution that has been skewering Broadway shows since 1982. That is before I was even born! Gerard Alessandrini started the riotous, biting revue to mock his beloved musical theatre as only a true fan could do. It’s like how the Comedy Central roasters were so mean (and so funny) the closer they were to the person being roasted. I mean back when they were funny, not in recent years when they roasted like James Franco.
The first version of “Forbidden Broadway” ran for thousands of performances, which is sick amazing, and then nearly every single season Gerard retooled the songs to attack current offerings on the Great White Way. He constantly and consistently worked, changing season after season, for more than twenty years! He picked up a Tony and some Drama Desk Awards for his outstanding hilarity as he went. There was a short break that occurred from 2009 to 2012, which is when I first saw it, I think. And recently it was in London for the first time ever! I really had doubts about how it would translate to London, because British people are not funny. Well they aren’t funny in the same way as us chosen people. But I haven’t seen an audience laugh this hysterically in a long time.
My main reason for going, besides my usual ‘I just have to see everything’ reason, is that Christina Bianco joined the cast. You may have seen Bianco on Ellen or in Time or taking over the internet with her impersonations of musical theatre and pop divas. She is astounding, nabbing everyone from Chenoweth to Idina to Bernadette to, my favorites, Julie Andrews and Celine Dion, with unbelievable precision. Luckily, most of her best impressions are featured in the show. She is like the musical and female Bill Hader who can sing like the best of them. So, nothing like Bill Hader. While the other cast members weren’t as successful in their interpretations (Mandy Patinkin and Liza Minelli sounded nothing like them), they were still as talented and as entertaining in their mockeries. Across the board, the comedic timing was near perfection, with the staging of some numbers even funnier than the lines being sung.
And oh my, the lines. The first main number that had me literally convulsing attacked “Matilda”, starting with “My mummy says I’m a triple threat” instead of the opening line of the show “My mummy says I’m a miracle”, and it’s sung by the big child stars of London – Billy Elliot, Gavroche from Les Mis, and, of course, Matilda. Bianco plays Matilda here, and it’s amazing because she not only is actually child-sized, but she also has the famous Matilda arm movements (hands on hips, then blowing her fists and other random and stilted movements) down pat. Then, instead of the rocking power song “We are revolting children”, the cast sings “We are exploited children living in exploiting times, we sing exhausting songs, using explicit rhymes.” It was perfect!
Bianco’s spot-on Matilda was only topped by her Kristin Chenoweth. It helps that she’s the same size, but she can do her exact voice. And not just the squeaky talking and chest-voice voice, but the opera-trained super-soprano that Cheno does as well, in shows like “Candide”, where her big song as Cunegonde is the famous “Glitter and be Gay”. (You should really watch this clip, starting at about minute 3). Well, here, it’s a send-up of Chenoweth herself, so it’s “Glitter and be Glib”. As Bianco talks one moment in Cheno’s recognizable voice about how great and famous she is, she jumps in the next moment and sings the insanely difficult opera parts about how glib she is – while also throwing in bits from “Popular” (from “Wicked”) and “My New Philosophy” (from Cheno’s Tony-winning role in “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown”). It’s one of the most impressive things I’ve seen in a long time, ending of course with a note higher than you expected that sent the (obvious) theatre students sitting next to me into spirals of self-doubt.
The funniest part, and the most hilariously offensive, was the “Miss Saigon” section. Oh my god. Bianco was dressed as Kim but in a red Chinese dress and long black wig, and Damian Humbley and Ben Lewis were Chris and John in their Army fatigues. “Sun and Moon”, between Kim and Chris, one of the most beautiful songs, turned from “You are sunlight and I moon” to something like “I’ll sing clichés and you’ll sing haikus”. So mean and so funny. When Kim pops out (literally) her child, Ben Lewis as John storms onstage and sings accusingly, “Is that Bui Doi??” in a send-up of John’s song about his charity for orphans of Vietnam. It’s AWFUL. It’s so funny.
But it didn’t even touch the final “Miss Saigon” part. Damian Humbley came onstage dressed as The Engineer, ostensibly to do his big and best number “The American Dream”. But no, he announces “My name is Cameron Mackintosh”, legendary, ridiculously successful producer of Saigon, Les Mis, etc. The opening notes of “American Dream” begin…and Damian-as-Cameron sings something along the lines of “When I transfer shows to New York…the Americans cream…” Oh my god people were CRYING. It hurt it was so funny. And it didn’t get less funny the more that line was repeated as Cameron shared his producing secrets: “All these bright lights and loud noise!…the Americans cream…” I still can’t believe this one. It was the best.
The “Les Miserables” section was almost as enjoyable, if a little long. While “God It’s High” (a play on “Bring Him Home” and how freaking high that song is written), a “Forbidden Broadway” standard, was here again, the new staging of the famous Les Mis turntable and some new songs like “On My Phone” made up for it. If you aren’t familiar with 99% of Les Mis productions, they use a turntable a lot of the time so the cast is often rotating. They spoof that here, first with the cast shuffling in circles, then with Javert and Eponine repeatedly missing the microphone and just getting bits of their solos out, then with other characters readying themselves to jump onto the turntable and joining in the shuffling, all while Jean Valjean shuffles by in the background every so often. It’s so freaking hilarious. It ends with the cast, dressed as various Les Mis characters, singing “Ten Years More”, about how Les Mis’s run will never end. The songs didn’t have the most creative lyrics, but the staging more than made up for it, sending the audience into hysterics. Also, Damian Humbley played Valjean, and it gave him the chance to really show off his impressive talents.
Actually, a lot of the stuff wasn’t new, sadly, but most of it was still enjoyable for me, and definitely for the rest of the uninitiated audience. “Into The Words” is a wonderful, somewhat intellectual, satire of how difficult Sondheim’s scores are to sing. In one of my favorite and easiest ways to get audiences on your side, we joined in a sing-along to see just how hard his stuff is: “Into The Woods” became “Into the words that trip your lip and fry your brain and sprain your tongue…” It nails everything wonderful and irritating about Sondheim classics, “the metaphors the synonyms the perfect scan”. This is one that has been on the recordings for years, but it still holds up.
Other classics that are rehashed here include the “Jersey Boys” parody “Walk Like A Man, Sing Like A Girl”, which you can’t not love, but the other “Jersey Boys” song, “Scary”, instead of “Sherry”, doesn’t really make you laugh. Also unwelcome was the “Wicked”/Idina Menzel spoof “Defying Subtlety”, which I hated 4 years ago and groaned when they began again here. I also did not appreciate sitting through “The Circle Of Mice”, about Disney’s takeover of theatre, for the like 9th time.
A different Idina standard, “Let It Go”, got much better treatment, mostly because of Bianco’s ridiculous impression of Menzel. The “Frozen” song became “Let It Blow”, about how loud and crazy Idina sings, and ends with “My nodes never bothered me anyway.” Kind of trite, but the impression sold it.
“Frozen” was one of the few new things in the second act that really worked. Sadly, the most lackluster part was “The Book of Mormon” spoof called “The Book of Morons”. It was Trey Parker and Matt Stone dressed in BOM costume and singing about how they made a masterpiece because theatre should be dirty and stuff. I guess it’s hard to really make fun of the funniest show currently running anywhere. Like how do you make good jokes about jokes? So yeah it was a wasted opportunity I guess. The “Charlie & the Chocolate Factory” number was a little better, with Ben Lewis perfectly costumed as Willy Wonka and singing “Come with me and you’ll see there’s a show with no imagination.” That opening line was the funniest part, but the rest wasn’t bad.
Really, the best part of this show, and of revues like it, is that if you are a true theatre fanatic, it rewards you for being one. You can enjoy the show if you are a theatre novice, but you can’t really appreciate all of the little genius jokes and asides and even some movements that are all inside jokes. All of these jokes and hilarious songs are only funny because you know the base material. You know that Bernadette Peters has a raspy and odd voice (impersonated to perfection again by Bianco begging her audience to “See Me On A Monday”, please). You know that Liza Minnelli moves about manically (though why Bianco didn’t do this impression I’ll never understand). You know how the opening moves to “A Chorus Line” get chanted “step kick kick leap kick touch! Again! Step kick kick leap kick touch!” and laugh when they are here changed to mock the upcoming production of “Cats”, to “lick scratch scratch purr lick scratch! Again!” Even though it’s pretty mean a lot of the time, “Forbidden Broadway” is really a love letter, albeit a sick one, to its current season and really all of musical theatre. And since most of the best songs get recycled every year, you can plan to catch it next time and enjoy pretty much the same stuff I did.
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Sondheim’s Memory Will Absolutely Be a Blessing
It’s so strange to think that Stephen Sondheim is no longer on this earth when the earth has so often felt like simply a platform for his work to exist. Everything that happens and everywhere I go and every word that every person says reminds me of some truth he shared with the world that we were lucky enough to hear and understand and connect with emotionally. No one was more honest about the complexities of human emotion and the depths of human frailty, and applying that honesty to musical theatre elevated it as an art form and reinforced that it’s deserving of respect. Look at what musical theatre can achieve, he said. Look at how we need musical theatre to truly express our humanity. That’s why we love him so much.
I’m not foolish enough to think that I can eulogize him better than others have (except the Guardian of course) or discuss the brilliance of his works in detail like theatre historians. I just wanted to take a few minutes to think about how important his creations are to me personally. Unfortunately I’m not able to do what everyone loves doing (and you can’t really fault them for doing it), which is to share a photo of me and the deceased, because I never had the opportunity to meet him. While part of me is of course sorry that that will never happen, part of me is glad because I can go on imagining him as more than an ordinary man. For me and for most of us who love theatre, he was this sort of holy figure, whose genius necessitated that he must be more than human, despite understanding and expressing humanity on such unparalleled levels.
This past weekend, I was without power and cell service for a few days due to the storm, and while that experience was one of the worst, it let me have a few extra days of believing I actually shared a planet with him, this great figure. That we existed in the same era and in the same universe is a miracle to me, and not just because it’s Chanukah and he was Jewish and I’m primed to be thinking all miracley anyway. He would be the last person to think of himself in such laudatory terms as we all do, as he was just a man (a NJB really), but his genius made him seem superhuman, despite that very genius being grounded in humanity.
On a personal level, his works form important touchstones for so many parts of my life. One of my earliest memories is watching the PBS airing of ‘Sunday in the Park with George’ over and over with my mom. She had taped it (VHS baby) so she would put it on frequently for years after. I remember it was even on when she was drying her hair one morning, and I was just staring at the small screen. Mandy Patinkin quickly became my mom’s favorite non-family (maybe even including family who knows) person in the world, and I loved everything about it, this woman in the dress with the poofy butt (who know one day I would work with her) and the colors and all these characters and above all the sound of this perfect music that I was too young to understand but knew was beautiful and important. As a teenager, I was obsessed with the dark twists of ‘Into the Woods’ and the lessons it taught about consequences and the ramifications of wishes, especially as someone raised on Disney princesses. But, I was also raised on ‘West Side Story’ and with it my dad’s favorite story of his single line: ‘COPS!’ And I’m not saying I married a man because he appreciates and loves how insanely ingenious ‘Assassins’ is but it’s not not why. I can’t imagine what life looks like without his shows helping us understand it.
It doesn’t matter that he was 91 or that we’ve been fearing this moment since his big 80th celebration. Genius of that sort is rare and now we are without his. But we have his work, his brilliant creations, each of them special and so many of them continually surprising in their truth and beauty. We are so lucky that his works keep getting produced and we can keep experiencing them, and in new ways, even if we will never get that fabled next show from him.
His genius was in peeling away layers to reveal raw human truths that seem so simple and clear but are so complicated, and doing that to incredible music. He seemed to so often be drawn to extremely niche situations for his settings — not e.g. a basic family drama that everyone could relate to but instead a group of aging former performers confronting their pasts in a closing dilapidated theatre, or a beloved painting brought to life through the backstory of its creator and muse, or a group of historical assassins detailing their exploits and commenting on the current state of politics (current at any time, another aspect of his brilliance). Even the situations that don’t seem too rare or extreme, like the single man deliberating his singledom, were novel and innovative at the time. Instead of writing characters as every day people we would immediately relate to, he made it so we related to people we didn’t automatically see ourselves in. We weren’t always reflected outwardly but we would soon feel emotionally connected and reflected due to the honesty and depth of his words and how the music enhanced their meaning. He found emotional truths in this nuance and showed them so clearly that the shadows seemed like daybreak. His legacy for me is how he let audiences easily see themselves in characters that aren’t clearly similar to them, or see truth in situations that don’t look like their normal lives, which more easily lets people connect with those different from them in real life. I believe he did this, and since being able to connect in those ways increases empathy, with his art he thus made the world a better place.
When loved ones die, Jewish people say may their memory be a blessing. To remember Stephen Sondheim is to remember his genius and how that genius manifested in the creation of these lasting works of emotional truth and humanity. His memory is a blessing, and will always be a blessing, as his life was, as his art was.
Helen Hunt is Great, Appropriately Infuriating in Old Vic’s Eureka Day
For a play that I went into fully expecting to give me terrible agita and have me tearing my hair out and grimacing like Jim Carrey when he’s kicking his own ass, do you mind?!, Eureka Day exceeded my expectations. All we knew going in was that it was about anti-vaxxers and ‘woke liberals’ &c so, yeah, AGITA COMES A CALLING. More importantly, that Helen Hunt was coming over to foggy London town to star in it, so we had to go. Helen Hunt baby! Did Mad About You even air here? Luckily, Eureka Day, by Jonathan Spector, was well done and well presented so I only had a little agita. We also unexpectedly cried laughing at certain parts, so overall I am as pro this play as I am pro vaccines.
Eureka Day is the name of a Berkeley private school (seemed elementary age, poss preschool, poss pre-to-teen even, gotta control them throughout the formative years!), so if you aren’t told anything else, you know this school’s gonna be heavily hawite, grossly wealthy, largely NIMBYers who act green (with their reusable totes and appropriately colored juices) but deep down are red (not just for tax breaks but also because they hate minorities (it’s true! they do!)). These are the kind of parents who think they are anti-racist but end up being super duper racist, who berate you for using plastic but vote for people who are destroying the planet. Or hey maybe they do vote properly, but they still hate all minorities! (it’s true! they do). We meet the board, made of 5-6 parents including the guy who seems kind of like the principal and definitely one who is like ‘remember the last three letters of that word spell P-A-L!’ Helen Hunt (I’m just gonna call her Helen okay), it becomes clear, has been part of this board since the beginning of this school, like for decades, possibly having kids just so she can keep being eligible. You have the father drinking his green juice out of a reusable bottle (the level of character detail! spot on), the mother with the sweet voice and the Thailand pants (you know the ones) (okay it might have just been ashram chic but I immediately thought Thailand pants), and then you have the newest member, a black woman (Susan Kelechi Watson), so you’re like OH. OH OKAY, let’s see how this goes.
We get dropped right into the messy topics these jamokes are gonna try to figure out: their first order of business is choosing the drop-down menu of ethnicities for future applicants. Coming in hot! Remember how I have said since I was a baby that every London show has an awkward Jewish moment? This one came right off the bat, so that was helpful. During the oh-so-well-meaning conversation, one of the parents reminds everyone of the time a Jewish parent said they weren’t comfortable choosing ‘white’ (valid! especially in Berkeley! they hate Jews and other them!), and another said “that’s not what this is about”. I loved the little subtle attention to detail that this crowd would indeed spend hours deciding whether ‘transracial adoptive family’ was something they needed to include but immediately dismiss the very complicated question of white-passing Jewish ethnicity (of course they didn’t entertain the idea of non-white Jews). I was just like, yep this is all very realistic, though I wonder how much of it was on purpose, and if anyone else understood the nuance or just laughed at the word “jew” as they always do in this city (they did! they always do!). Just like, what an introduction to what this group was gonna be like! That super white liberal kind of subtle racism, it’s so accurate.
The characterization continues to be strong throughout. It becomes clear that the juicing father and the sweet other woman are having an affair — but then in true Berkeley fashion, the tables turn on us, and it turns out they aren’t actually sneaking around because his wife knows and has consented to opening the relationship. My god it’s spot on. My other favorite little subtle detail is when Helen at one point says ‘When they go low, we go high, right?’ quoting Michelle Obama and makes the tiniest little ‘you get me!’ gesture to Kelechi Watson. IT IS SO ACCURATE. All the actors are so good, so attuned to their characters.
We get to the meat of the show after a mumps outbreak forces the school to close. I know what you are thinking if you are old enough to read: mumps? Didn’t we solve that with vaccines like when I was an infant? It’s back, baby! Just like in real life because people are insane and easily taken advantage of by monsters who just want money, power, and I guess to watch the world burn, only about half the kids in Eureka Day are vaxxed. As one of the few clear-headed parents says in the chat on the subsequent school-wide Zoom call, “WAIT HALF THE SCHOOL ARE ANTI-VAXXERS???”
Guys, this Zoom call, it is a thing of pure theatrical, comedic beauty. I cannot get over it. There’s no way I can spoil it either even if I share all the funniest parts, because it’s like a 20 minute long funniest part, all of it. While the board talks, the show projects the chat box onto the back wall, and honestly no one in that theatre could tell you anything the board was saying, because all you heard was laughter as the chat scrolled. (I’m pretty sure that’s the point and you aren’t supposed to be listening to the board.) It is SPOT ON. The kinds of commenters, the vibes, the one parent who sends the same emoji in response to everything; the people asking if anyone else can hear anything, the others trying to help them navigate the controls; the people asking questions that the board will clearly be answering if you give them a minute, the people responding ‘I think they’re getting to that’. The accuracy of this call falling to shit, it’s hilarious. We’ve all seen these comments before. But when we get to the specifics of this call, man oh man. The parents suggesting giving your child ginger and raisin instead of ibuprofen (f-ing Berkeley) because ‘we don’t want to poison our kids’, the response ‘oh but letting them die of preventable disease is okay!’ The suggestion to visit a chiropractor, followed by the smart person saying that chiros are largely quacks, followed by “actually chiropractors have more hours studying anatomy than doctors” followed by “well my dog has more hours smelling shit than doctors but that doesn’t make him a proctologist.” IT WAS AMAZING. On and on it went, anti-vaxxers vs. sane people, all-capsing in the comments as the board absolutely loses control. It was so cathartic, and poss one of my favorite theatre moments in a long time.
The discussion challenges the board, since they don’t do anything without consensus, which in itself is an interesting point because how is that every possible. Decisions like this are all about how the choices are framed – is it protecting kids or endangering them? Is it about giving families freedom to decide for themselves or taking their decision-making abilities away from them and controlling their parenting? As the board decides what to do, whether to change the flexible vax policy to protect the kids, or to protect FREEDOM, you learn more about why certain people, namely Helen’s character, would be anti-vax (oh yeah she’s one). In doing so, the show provides a good balance of compassion for both sides, without giving credence to the idea that facts and science have two sides. There’s just one side! That’s what makes it science! But giving some backstory, some really heartbreaking backstory, helps this play accomplish the difficult task of having this conversation in the first place without it just being that (gorgeous) Zoom call. And it is difficult, all of it, knowing whether we are supposed to believe Helen or realize that we can have empathy for her without necessarily taking her words at face value; grappling with having empathy for someone whose decisions could literally kill people…it’s all layered and hard.
I read the reviews and your British reviewers were very much ‘it didn’t work for me given the British schooling system’ (what even is that b.s.) and ‘it seemed to let liberals off the hook’ and ‘I keep spelling it *Berkley* even though I have I a whole range of editors and fact-checkers at this professional publication’ but I think this play does a great job showing how we’ve gotten to this point, how complicated it all is, how important not to let the complications and the difficulties blind you to the truths (something about the forest for the trees) and how we can try dealing with it without only using all-caps yelling. Though you know I love all-caps yelling. Especially at anti-vaxxers.
INFORMATION
Eureka Day runs at the Old Vic until Oct 31 (WE ARE NOT TAWKING ABOUT HALLOWEEN). The first act is like 40-45 minutes? (a dream) The second is just over an hour. All the way upstairs at the Old Vic continues to be the best value and have the emptiest bathrooms!
