Watching Forbidden Broadway at the Straz Center the other night, I was struck by the idea of Broadway as a small planet on which all sorts of flora and fauna nonsensically co-exist. Where but on Planet Broadway would you find Tevye the Milkman and Little Orphan Annie, Liza Minnelli and the Lion King, Stephen Sondheim and the Phantom of the Opera all cohabiting happily? Where else would Carol Channing and Cameron Mackintosh be bedfellows, and where else would Mary Poppins feed the birds next to Frankie Valli?

There are other planets in our galaxy – Planet Hollywood, of course, but also Planet D. C., Planet Hip-Hop, and Planet Cable News, just to name a few – but Planet Broadway is the only one in which Don Quixote and Mandy Patinkin rub elbows after dinner, and Gypsy’s ambitious Mama Rose is inhabited by even more ambitious Patti LuPone. So much for Polaris and the planet Neptune: it’s Chita Rivera and The Little Mermaid who swim in tandem through our Collective Telescope, and it’s a wonder we can absorb it all. Oh, and those Cats. And Bebe Neuwirth. And that Venus Flytrap…

Which is a roundabout way of saying that Forbidden Broadway (to which the Straz version adds the subheading “Greatest Hits: Vol. I”) is a lot of fun, and a robust reminder of what’s up, what’s down and what’s probably immortal in the land of the $200 ticket. Utilizing only four gifted actors – Lauren Gemilli, Heather Krueger, Derek Baxter and Justin Lore — Gerard Alessandrini’s revue not only satirizes Fiddler and In The Heights, it also reminds us how indelible certain songs, characters and performers have become over the last 50 years.

This article appears in Nov 11-17, 2010.