Forbidden Broadway: Rude Awakening - 25th Anniversary Cast Recording

Forbidden Broadway: Rude Awakening, the CD of the off-Broadway show's 25th-anniversary edition, is, I regret to say, a losing proposition—like, I am even sorrier to say, the show itself. Even, if possible, much more losing yet.

But let me begin with the good news, scant as it now is. For 25 years, Gerald Alessandrini has tickled our ribs with his satirical parodies of Broadway shows (mostly musicals) and their performers, both the hits and the flops, but, understandably, more the former. So, for a quarter century, which is an even longer time in the theater than in life, we have been laughing at Broadway's fables and foibles, for some years heartily and, later, ever more haltingly. What was happening?

Here it must be conceded that for tourists who catch Forbidden Broadway once or, at most, once in a while, it is a different thing from what it is for us battle- or prattle-scarred veterans. Diminishing returns are an evolving, or devolving, process, from which sporadic acquaintance is a sort of protection.

Let us, however, concentrate on the current CD, which is my subject here. As recorded and released, it is a c.d.—a certifiable disappointment. To begin with, the parodic element in this material depends as much on the visual as on the auditory. Thanks to Alvin Colt's jolly costume design, a good deal of the humor is in what you see, because the veteran Colt has so successfully designed the costumes of so many Broadway shows that what he gives us here is to an extent self-parody, which manages to be both more potent and more poignant than mere parody.

[IMG:R]Yet there is also the acting—in this case that of Jared Bradshaw, Janet Dickinson, James Donegan, and Valerie Fagan. They, like their many FB predecessors, create fun with their faces and bodies as much as with their words and singing, although only the latter two translate to disc. The CD should have been a DVD.

This is where the accompanying booklet could have come to at least partial rescue. What would have helped is the printing of the lyrics. Merely hearing them—imperfectly as with most hearings of recordings, what with wandering attention and rapid-fire delivery easier to apprehend in an intimate theater—does not suffice.

And something else—elusive, hard to define, yet real enough. When you watch FB in a tiny theater that nearly abolishes the barrier between performer and spectator, you become slaphappily pretty much part of the show. But there is no way of becoming part of a CD.

Finally, not only the absence of the lyrics in a booklet is a problem; there is also the annoying presence of a fold-out leaflet in which, for four-and-a-half double-column pages in microscopic print, Alessandrini showers his show with an ill-written, often ungrammatical, deluge of delusions of grandeur. There are, on the verso, some puny pictures from the show, but they speak less loud than Alessandrini's thousand words here, and would that they were only a thousand!

Well, if you are an FB addict, you get the 15 numbers of Rude Awakening (which takes its name from a parody of Spring Awakening) plus six bonus numbers by FB performers-in-waiting, for what they are worth. For the rest of us, the CD, like the show, may prove a rude awakening very different from the one intended.

John Simon is the New York theater critic for Bloomberg News.