Forbidden Broadway: S. V. U.

SPAM BLOCKER West, from left, Mather and Bradshaw make a Spamalot kabob.

The opposite of love, the saying goes, isn’t hate. Nor is its opposite Alessandrini’s harpoon-sharp lampooning of Broadway musicals. While inducing chuckles, snickers and guffaws, the 25-year-old series assails dire Broadway trends with all the passion and verve of someone hopelessly in love with the object of attack, uh, affection. And in love Alessandrini is—with a lost Golden Era musical, Bernstein’s lovely melodies and Sondheim’s heady sophistication. In the latest iteration, Special Victims Unit, the victim is the bygone Broadway musical, and Alessandrini is its Marx Brother physician.

A barbed bouquet tossed onto the Broadway stage, the spoof uses just a piano player and four actors sporting stamped-on Great White Way grins to ask, rhetorically, Why care about a musical’s quality when its visuals are so gosh-darn dazzling? The lines often cut to the quick. Mary Poppins’s tagline becomes “practically putrid in every way.” Of the jukebox musical, Oklahoma!’s leading man croons, “Oh, what a terrible genre.”

The wild-eyed Fagan hits Sarah Brightman’s glass-shattering trills eerily well, West’s Harvey Fierstein is scarily dead-on and Bradshaw pegs a dolphin-high imitation of Jean Valjean’s “Bring Him Home.” The darts don’t always hit the bull’s-eye: With a musical as satirically fertile as Wicked, giving it the battling-diva treatment signals a missed opportunity. And while some material has exceeded its sell-by date, you don’t have to be as big a musical-theater geek as the author to appreciate what he’s really gunning for: a culture increasingly prizing insta-stars, big-buck glitz and self-referential parodies over artistic worth.—Novid Parsi