There are, in the main, two types of people in the audience for
Forbidden Broadway. There’s your devotees who preach evangelically about this Broadway legend and the previous times it has come to the UK, the ones who laugh in anticipation of the jokes that they probably know already, and then there’s the more regular folk who might find themselves just a little turned off by the smugness of a show that is essentially one big inside joke.
Gerard Alessandri’s original concept, augmented here with additional material from Phillip George, is indubitably a classic – making viciously biting fun of the biggest shows to hit (and miss) our stages such as
Once,
Les Mis,
Book of Mormon etc and this iteration of the show has its West End-specific references too,
The Pajama Game and
Charlie and Chocolate Factory come in for a hammering here, there is indeed much to laugh at.