The Tenth Anniversary Edition of Gerard Alessandrini’s “Forbidden Broadway”—justifiably titled “The Best of Forbidden Broadway”—is, as one might expect, a treat. It features two new moqueuses (Leah Hocking and Alix Korey), one old favorite (Michael McGrath), and a Mr. Patrick Quinn, who is new to me and constitutes a real find. Mr. Quinn is very large—so large, in fact, relative to the stage at Theater East, that everything he does is funny, which it probably would be in any case. If there is a principle at work here, I can’t put a name to it, but it may have something to do with magnified deadpan.
In general (since this seems to be a moment for reassessment), I think Mr. Alessandrini’s best routines get at concepts—the shows and plays themselves—rather than at people. On the other hand, I don’t know that I would really want to live in a world in which Alessandrini’s lampoons of Liza Minelli, Topol, and Mandy Patinkin didn’t exist. So there you are. The new material doesn’t quite plumb the depths of this season’s sillinesses and hypocrisies. When Mr. Alessandrini gets around the putting together a brand new show, I hope he’ll remember that the musical parodies of straight plays make up some of his best. My favorite sequences are still his sendup of “M. Butterfly” and “Madonna’s Brain,” the “Speed the Plow” number in which David Mamet and Ron Silver try to teach Madonna to act (“Quit, Professor Mamet!”) and she ends up tearing off most of her clothes.
There’s an entirely different kind of high-stakes deadpan at work in “Gunmetal Blues,” the wonderful little Chandleresque musical that AMAS is producing down at Theater Off Park. Written by Marion Adler (lyrics), Craig Bohmler (music), and Scott Wentworth (book), the show will probably appeal to the same audiences that visit and revisit “Forbidden Broadway,” as well as to anyone with a fondness for film noir, hard-boiled detective fiction, and small-scale musicals in general. The story—it involves a Private Eye, a Piano Player, and an assortment of Blondes—is beside the point in much the same way that Chandler’s plots were beside the point; in one of his essays, Chandler observed that for the purposes of the genre “a good plot was one which made good scenes.” For “good scene,” read “Good number,” and you have a pretty fair idea of the mechanics of “Gunmetal Blues,” except that there’s an added pleasure in the fact that the people who conceived the story are often the ones performing the numbers. Mr. Wentworth, who plays the Private Eye himself, does so with laconic panache, while Miss Adler herself plays all the Blondes. There’s a Mary Astor seductress type, a hard-living chanteuse, a lost ingenue, and (no doubt to supply the element of social awareness that was rarely missing from Chandler’s novels) a homeless bag lady. Daniel Marcus, who portrays the Piano Player with such virtuosity—backed by a charming five-man band—also plays a host of minor characters: cops, footmen, and heavies.
Davis Hall’s inventive production has a number of things to recommend it: the way it manages to show off the extraordinary range and versatility of all three performers without once sacrificing the restraint needed to put over this kind of material, the way Eduardo Sicango’s beautiful Hopperesque set lights up at the Piano Player’s big moment (everyone gets a show-stopping number), and the way in which a mute character—a silent waiter (Michael Knowles) who wanders in and out of the bar where the play is set—takes over as uninvolved onlooker whenever the Piano Player seems to be taking too active a part. One of the cleverest things about the show is the way it focuses on the part voyeurism plays not only in the subtext of the genre and in its attraction for us but also in the motivation of the self-conscious, detached hero, who is, after all, both the author of his story and its primary audience.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, May 4, 1992