Finally, there's a show on the Strip for locals, not tourists.
That's not to say tourists won't also get a kick out of the hilarious send-ups of some of Vegas' most famous personages, but those of us who live in the midst of this flashing neon whirlpool will laugh a little louder and a little more often than the couple visiting from Queens or Thousand Oaks.
Back in 1982, Gerard Alessandrini, the show's creator, writer and director, was an unemployed New York actor. He put together a dinner-theater show lampooning Broadway hits and found he had a hit himself. It has since spawned Forbidden Hollywood and now Forbidden Vegas.
The immensely talented cast of Carter Calvert, Valerie Fagan, Eric Lee Johnson and Michael West are Forbidden veterans, and they make their multiple portrayals and impersonations seem easy. Together, they bring to the stage Celine and Babs, Elton and Liberace, Steve and Eydie, Frank and Liza, even major Strip properties and Steve Wynn as Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom. About the only ones missing are Siegfried & Roy, despite their caricatures appearing on the promotional material.
The songs are equally as inventive, riffing off popular hits by the performers (for example, Wayne Newton singing a parody of "Danke Schoen" in different pitches for his different ages) or out-and-out satire, such as lyrics poking homosexual fun at Cirque du Soleil to the tune of the Village People's "YMCA."
Throughout it all, Kim Douglas Steiner keeps up a relentless pace at the onstage piano, and certainly deserves a curtain call all his own. The multiple costume changes are quick and creative, perhaps none more so than the final switch to tuxedos and evening wear at the show's perfectly timed conclusion.
It might be Alessandrini's Manhattan experience that makes his shots at Las Vegas somewhat acerbic during his send-up of Mamma Mia—with countless butts from the five boroughs filling seats both here and there—and his mocking of us drawling folk from the "Big V"—the women looking more like ho'd-up Long Island matrons in search of a ho-down than any local women—but the humor is generally in the form of pokes and jabs, never uppercuts.
The producers promise that the show will continue to change and be updated as acts on the Strip come and go. Here's hoping they have years of such reincarnations to look forward to. Who knows, perhaps one day another satirical production will have to be created to mock the mockers.