Paranoia, the Destroyer

Saturday afternoon, I finally got around to catching a performance of Forbidden Broadway: SVU. The revue has been playing at the Royal George cabaret for six or eight weeks now on its break from New York, and it's been selling well enough that it just announced another extension here, through September 2.

I had seen another iteration of Forbidden Broadway in New York in 2000, and just prior to its current Chicago run I interviewed its creator, Gerard Alessandrini. Though it didn't make it into the final print interview, I had asked Alessandrini if he thought Chicago audiences, who didn't necessarily know the ins and outs of what was going on on Broadway, would get all the jokes. He seemed pretty confident that we would, and noted that most of the shows they parodied had been through Chicago either on their way to Broadway or on tour afterward; I was particularly curious, having been given a preliminary copy of the show's running order, how things might have changed in the past two months.

The answer is: not much, really. The show got high marks from most of the Chicago reviewers, and obviously has been selling well if it's extending. But the performance I attended was a real litmus test: a Saturday early matinee (FB does three shows on Saturdays, at 2pm, 5pm and 8pm). This was going to be the ultimate "bluehair" performance, and late in the run. How would it go over?

Ultimately, it was a hit. The order of the numbers has been rearranged extensively from the advance plan I saw, but it's overall the same content. The 2pm audience was slow to warm up, but we did. My friend Adam and I, both under-30 theater majors, were easily the youngest in the room and often the quickest to laugh, but there were several other audience members who were clearly regular Broadway visitors and who got a lot of the visual jokes that no one else did. One lady in particular seemed to be an NYC regular; where the majority of the audience would breathe a palpable sigh of relief when they recognized music from Fiddler but then didn't get the gags about the recent revival and Harvey Fierstein, this lady got all the jokes about Light in the Piazza.

As the show ended, though, I heard the most telling commentary. When we were getting up to head for the exit, a man in the row behind us was talking to his wife about not just Adam and I, but the older audience members who were often solo laughers during the show.

"They obviously had plants in the audience," he was saying. "She was laughing before the jokes."

I wanted to tell him that no, she was just laughing at the jokes he didn't get. But what would have been the point?

Comments

[owens]

thank you.