ABSOLUTELY FORBIDDEN BROADWAY By Peter Filichia
Tempus does fugit, to paraphrase what Virgil said more than 2,000 years ago.
Or, as we like to say, “Time flies.”
Can it really be 44 years since Gerard Alessandrini brought his parody-filled FORBIDDEN BROADWAY to Palsson’s Supper Club in New York?
Figures don’t lie. Do the math: January 15, 1982, at Palsson’s, the West 72nd Street cabaret now known as The Triad.
Could Alessandrini have ever imagined that his many versions of the revue would be done thousands upon thousands of times? And considering that FORBIDDEN BROADWAY has never played Broadway, Alessandrini could have never expected that he’d receive an Honorary Tony in 2006 “for Excellence in Theatre.”
Congratulations, Mr. A., on a job – hundreds of jobs, really –
extraordinarily done. But I must admit when I first heard the term “Forbidden Broadway” and didn’t yet know what it actually meant, I assumed that the revue would simply include Broadway show songs that sported profanities – such as “bastard.”
“Bastard” took a long time to be heard on the cast album of a musical, although it was sung on stage in 1945, thanks to CAROUSEL. The first time it was heard on a Broadway recording was in 1963 – but not in a musical.
Columbia recording guru Goddard Lieberson put Edward Albee’s controversial WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? on four discs that were full of four-letter words.
But there’s an irony in how “bastard” was used. In the middle of the first act, after harried husband George entered with a rifle and gave every indication that he was about to shoot his wife Martha, the rifle was revealed to have no bullets in it, but an umbrella. On the disc, Martha roared, “You bastard!” – but in the theater, she actually said the five-letter vulgarism for penis. Lieberson wasn’t going to let anyone hear that at home.
In 1956, in the interests of good taste, Lieberson didn’t change a word in THE MOST HAPPY FELLA’s “Ooh, My Feet”, but eliminated one. He had Susan Johnson, playing an exhausted waitress, only say “son of a” before she was interrupted by an orchestral punctuation.
Lieberson, though, produced the first commercially released cast album with the word “damn” in it: “Bloody Mary” in SOUTH PACIFIC, where the sailors, Seabees and Marines all proclaimed, “Now ain’t that too damn bad?” when referring to Liat’s mother.
What’s interesting is that Lieberson’s KISS ME, KATE could have been the first, for it was released in February 1949, seven weeks before Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical opened.
The word came in “Brush Up Your Shakespeare,” one of the all-time great eleven-o’clock numbers. If you went to the Century Theatre to see the Cole Porter masterpiece, you would have heard two hitmen sing, “If you can’t be a ham and do HAMLET, they will not give a damn or a damlet.”
But Lieberson cut the couplet. May we assume that as time went on, he decided that he should have included the KISS ME, KATE “damn” – and that’s why he left it in SOUTH PACIFIC? For that matter, not including the line in “Brush Up Your Shakespeare” also meant dropping the name of the play that is arguably The Bard’s most famous.
(And Lieberson had left in the rather vulgar reference to CORIOLANUS, hadn’t he?)
Eighteen months later, CALL ME MADAM had “damn” show up in “Mrs. Sally Adams.” The ensemble sang that the new ambassador to Lichtenburg “doesn’t give a damn if they like it or not.”
Originating Ms. Adams was the crusty, down-to-earth (if not down-to-hell) Ethel Merman; if you know her, you can easily see her described in those terms. But Dinah Shore, subbing for Merman on the cast album because of contract issues, was an America’s-Sweetheart type who would give… a darn.
Profane lyrics didn’t start getting recorded in earnest until a dozen years later, thanks to HAIR, the musical that urged “the mind’s true liberation.” Its first cast album (of what would be at least a dozen) came after its off-Broadway premiere in October 1967. In “Ain’t Got No,” two body parts were mentioned eight years before Val in A CHORUS LINE would also mention them in a single song.
When HAIR moved to Broadway in April 1968, a new cast album was made that offered a new song and was far more frank. Its cover boasted that “All the songs in this album have been recorded complete and unexpurgated as they are performed on the Broadway stage.” Well, who’d expect the counter-cultural hippies to censor themselves with words such as “shoot” and “fudge”?
Ironically enough, in both the off-Broadway and Broadway cast albums of HAIR, the first “damn” you hear is uttered not by a hippie, as you’d expect, but by an adult: “What makes you so damn superior?”, she asked the teens and twentysomethings.
To many, there’s a profound difference from “damn” and “goddamn.” Listen to the 1949 original cast album of GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES with Carol Channing. You won’t hear the full version of “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” that Lorelei Lee sang on stage: “Some men buy, and some just sigh that to make you their bride they intend. But buyers or sighers, they’re such goddamned liars.”
But 63 years later, Megan Hilty did sing it on the 2012 Encores! recording.
RCA included “goddamn” in “Paris Original” in HOW TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESS WITHOUT REALLY TRYING. However, a bit more than six years later, when the label recorded YOUR OWN THING – not so incidentally, three months after the off-Broadway HAIR – the line, “Then, goddammit, I’ll hum” was amended to “Then I’ll hum.”
The answer could be the tastes of RCA’s producers, because each recording had different ones. And perhaps Frank Loesser, who wrote the score to HOW TO SUCCEED, insisted that the word stay, even if one of the recording’s producers said, “You know, Frank, we could change it to, ‘Oh, dammit’…”
Let’s face it: Loesser, whose WHERE’S CHARLEY? and GUYS AND DOLLS had become two of the longest-running shows of their era, had more leverage than YOUR OWN THING’s just-starting-outers Danny Apolinar and Hal Hester.
But three years earlier, when MGM recorded WHOOP-UP in 1958, it dared to include the “goddamn” twice, once in the soft-shoe “Flattery” and “Men,” a harangue that owes a lot to THE MUSIC MAN’S “Ya Got Trouble.”
(The aforementioned Susan Johnson, denied that “bitch” in THE MOST HAPPY FELLA, got both “goddamns” here.)
Maybe MGM didn’t worry about the cusswords because it recorded the album after WHOOP-UP had been reviewed by Broadway’s critics; by that time, the company must have known that very few people would be purchasing their album.
Come to think of it, if people were calling or writing MGM to complain, they may have been grousing not about the profanity, but the score. When as a teen I bought WHOOP-UP, somewhere around the fourth or fifth song, I said, “Oh! So not all Broadway musicals are wonderful… dammit!”
Peter Filichia can be heard most weeks of the year on www.broadwayradio.com. His day-by-day wall calendar – A SHOW TUNE FOR TODAY – 366 Songs to Brighten Your Year – is ready for 2026 and is now available on Amazon and The Drama Book Shop.
