EXCLUSIVE: Four decades after Gerard Alessandrini introduced his Broadway satirical revue at an Upper West Side cabaret, the ever-changing spoof will finally plant its funny flag in a Broadway theater.
Forbidden Broadway, Merrily We Stole a Song is scheduled to run at the Hayes Theater July 29 to Nov. 4, according to a pitch deck prepared for prospective investors. The title is a play on Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s Merrily We Roll Along, which evolved from 1981 flop to this season’s boffo revival, which is on the cusp of recouping its $13 million capitalization.
Victoria Lang, Ryan Bogner and Tracey McFarland of Broadway & Beyond Theatricals and John Freedson are producing Forbidden Broadway‘s latest installment for a fraction of the cost of the shows it skewers. It’s being capitalized for $2.8 million and it should break even at a weekly published box office gross of about $347,000. Big musicals now routinely need $1 million in weekly ticket sales to cover their running costs.
The investor pitch doesn’t detail casting, but it references a “rotating guest spot” each week for cameo performances. A similar celebrity strategy helped another low-frills parody, Gutenberg! The Musical!, stay in the news and swiftly recoup its $6.5 million investment. It didn’t hurt that its leads were the popular Book of Mormon alums Andrew Rannells and Josh Gad, playing desperate writers pitching their show to investors.
Sondheim, who died in 2021, was a longtime fan of the Forbidden Broadway franchise. “’The meaner, the funnier,'” Sondheim told Alessandrini, Harry Haun recently reported in the Observer.
Lang, Bogner and McFarland didn’t return emails seeking comment.
The full-circle moment for Forbidden Broadway — which has played some 9,000 performances off-Broadway and on tour — is testament to how the theater parody genre that Alessandrini helped create in 1982 has endured. Booking the Hayes, Broadway’s smallest house, with about 600 seats, is significant for another reason. The rental provides relatively low-risk income for Second Stage Theater, which completed its purchase of the venue in 2015 for $25 million and has been under intense financial pressure for years.
As of August 2022, the nonprofit company had raised $48 million — including millions from the City of New York — toward its $70 million goal for buying and renovating the theater and creating a financial reserve for the organization. Its plan to sell the naming rights to the Hayes, which it repeatedly telegraphed, hasn’t panned out. Second Stage still carries a $14 million mortgage on the property.
On Friday, Second Stage confirmed industry rumors that it had ended its lease on its off-Broadway Tony Kiser Theater in a former bank building on Eighth avenue near Times Square. As of 2022, the annual rent for the theater was $890,000, nearly three times the rent when it opened the venue in 1999. It relinquishes the space at year-end.
Lang, Bogner and McFarland presented two prior summer rentals at the Hayes: The Kite Runner in 2022 and The Cottage in 2023, neither of which announced recouping. (The Cottage was directed by Jason Alexander, an original cast member of Merrily We Roll Along and onetime cast member of Forbidden Broadway.)
The exact dates for Forbidden Broadway, Merrily We Stole a Song are still tentative, according to the pitch deck. The engagement could benefit from strong brand recognition — and Sondheim’s vote of confidence.