Forbidden Broadway

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Forbidden Broadway is an Off-Broadway show created and written by Gerard Alessandrini and directed by Alessandrini and long-time collaborator Phillip George. It opened on January 15, 1982 at Palsson's Supper Club in New York City and ran for 2,332 performances.[1] It has subsequently been rewritten several times to include parodies of newer shows. The current incarnation, Forbidden Broadway: Special Victims Unit[2], is presently playing at the 47th Street Theatre in New York.

The show is a musical that spoofs the show tunes, characters and plots of current Broadway musicals, often commenting on the apparent deterioration of quality on Broadway and how nothing is what it used to be on the Great White Way. Forbidden Broadway has mocked megahits like Les Misérables, Annie Get Your Gun, Hairspray, The Lion King, The Music Man, Miss Saigon, and Rent. It also targets famous Broadway actors, writers, composers, directors, choreographers and producers, including Carol Channing, Bob Fosse, Elton John, Jennifer Holliday, Patti LuPone, Mary Martin, Ethel Merman, Ann Miller, Mandy Patinkin, Stephen Sondheim, Harvey Fierstein, Barbra Streisand and Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Forbidden Broadway is a four-person show, with two men and two women. In addition to running in one form or another for over twenty-five years, Forbidden Broadway has released eight albums, as well as one entitled Forbidden Hollywood, a soundtrack of the show of the same title by Alessandrini. Like Forbidden Broadway, Forbidden Hollywood is made up of parodies, except that it targets movies rather than musicals.