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    The One Where It’s a Live Musical Parody of Your Favorite TV Show

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    “We made these musicals to get people who don’t go to musicals to go to musicals,” said a creator of the Off Broadway “Friends” and “The Office” parodies. “They’re a gateway drug.”The titles of the songs in “Friends! The Musical Parody,” now playing at the Theater Center on West 50th Street, will be familiar to anyone with even a passing acquaintance with the sitcom about six coffee shop lingerers in New York. Joey sings an ode to the art of seduction entitled “How You Doin’?” Chandler and Monica’s amorous duet is “Could I Be Any More in Love With You?” There’s a song about adapting to challenging circumstances called “Pivot,” and, naturally, the post-interval number is “We Were on a Break.”“Friends” isn’t the only television show that has wound up on the musical stage recently. This month, audiences can go see screwy, unauthorized takes on the workplace sitcom “The Office” (“The Office! A Musical Parody”) and Netflix’s sci-fi horror series “Stranger Things” (“Stranger Sings! The Parody Musical”).The shows resemble elongated “Saturday Night Live” sketches with Off Broadway production values. (The monstrous Demogorgon in “Stranger Sings” is partly made out of pool noodles, duct tape and press-on nails.) It’s “Forbidden Broadway” for those more familiar with Ross and Rachel, or Jim and Pam, than Rodgers and Hammerstein.The creators of the “Friends” and “The Office” parodies, Bob McSmith and Tobly McSmith (both 41, and not related), have been making what they loosely call parody musicals for nearly 20 years. “We made these musicals to get people who don’t go to musicals to go to musicals,” Tobly McSmith said. “They’re a gateway drug.”The pair, who met as housemates in Park Slope, bonded over a shared appreciation — equal parts amusement and bemusement — of the high school sitcom “Saved by the Bell.” “It was just on in the morning,” Tobly said. “We’d watch it, we’d smoke pot, we’d go to work.”In that state of herbal-assisted merriment, they hit upon the idea of a “Saved by the Bell” musical. Despite their rudimentary musical skills, and the fact that neither had any experience in the theater, they wrote a bunch of songs and sketches, posted a call for actors on Craigslist, and started to put on the show for free in 2005 at Apocalypse Lounge in the East Village. The place was packed every night. “It was a beautiful mess,” Tobly said. “The audience loved it.”From left, Laura Mehl, Danny Adams and Emma Brock in “The Office! A Musical Parody.”Russ RowlandSince then, they have created spoofs of the TV shows “Beverly Hills, 90210” and “Full House,” as well as a mash-up of “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” and the musical “Cats.” A “Parks and Recreation” parody is on the way, and when the “Friends” show leaves for its national tour — it has already played in Las Vegas; Portland, Maine; and Australia — it will be replaced by the McSmiths’ take on “Love Actually.”Each show finds its own balance between paying tribute and sending up. “We try to evoke the same humor but in different ways,” Tobly said, “and surprise people with things they notice about the show but never really internalized.” The McSmiths are also undeterred by the seeming tautology of presenting comic reinterpretations of comedies. “We call that a hat on a hat on a hat,” Tobly said. “If you can get to five hats — that’s hilarious.”In the case of “Friends! The Musical Parody,” part of the fun is the hectic combination of pointed critique, 10 seasons’ worth of plot, and extratextual jokes about the actors’ salaries and post-“Friends” careers. There’s a whole song dedicated to the near-obligatory observation of the massiveness of Monica and Rachel’s apartment but, also, more spikily, a reference to the blinding whiteness of the cast.Ross’s pet monkey, Marcel, gets a song, too. “The idea that Ross has a pet monkey for a few episodes is the most ridiculous thing,” Bob McSmith said. Ultimately, “Friends! The Musical Parody” is a show by fans for fans. “We call all our shows loving lampoons,” he said. “Parody doesn’t have to be cruel.”“Stranger Sings: The Parody Musical” — opening on Thursday at the Players Theater with book, music and lyrics by Jonathan Hogue — similarly springs from a place of love. “Parody can be a dirty word in the industry,” said Savannah-Lee Mumford, who plays Barb. “What this show does so well is take care to honor the source material rather than poke at its flaws. It enhances it.”Honoring the source material in “Stranger Sings! The Parody Musical”: From left, Adele Simms, Jalen Bunch, Dean Cestari, Patrick Howard and Ariana Perlson.Bruce GlikasThe Netflix series, about suburban adolescents battling paranormal forces, draws from a host of inspirations, including the works of Steven Spielberg and Stephen King, as well as the teen rom-com “Sixteen Candles.” “Stranger Sings” honors that spirit, musically. Eleven, the psychokinetic young girl prone to nosebleeds, has an “I Want” song modeled on “Somewhere That’s Green” from “Little Shop of Horrors.” Steve Harrington, the well-coiffed teenage lunk, has a swaggering hair-metal tune; and Joyce Byers (played by Winona Ryder on the series), the perpetually frazzled single mother of a missing boy, gets a high-camp diva number worthy of Patti LuPone.“That’s part of the fun of parody as a form,” Hogue said. “You get to throw in as many references as you want.”Hogue also incorporated some of the online discourse about the TV show. Most notably, the character of Barb — a fan favorite who abruptly met her demise, inspiring the #JusticeForBarb hashtag on social media — gets the big moment she was denied onscreen, belting out the lyric: “Clearly I’m not central to this plot.”“We heard the internet,” Mumford said. “She definitely got the short end of the stick on the TV series. So this a gift for the fans.”“Stranger Sings” originated as a concert at Feinstein’s/54 Below, where these sorts of screen-to-stage mutations are something of a mainstay: In recent years, it has hosted musical adaptations of “Star Wars,” “Dexter” and “Pokémon,” to name a few. Before “Stranger Sings,” Hogue directed his own “Friends” musical concert for Feinstein’s/54 Below.Clearly, the more improbable the transformation, the better. But are these any more unlikely than musicals adapted from, say, a B-movie about a man-eating plant or an 800-page biography of Alexander Hamilton?This is all legal, by the way, under the laws regarding parody and fair use, as long as the shows are genuine adaptations — not mere facsimiles — and don’t give the impression of being officially sanctioned. The McSmiths have had only one run-in along these lines. “Andrew Lloyd Webber did not find our Kardashians-Cats musical as funny as we did,” Tobly said. “We agreed to change the music tracks to a couple songs, including ‘Meow-mories’ sung by Cat-lyn Jenner, and they left us alone.”Perhaps, after a year’s worth of pandemic binge-watching at home, some audiences will be drawn to theater that recreates television in all its reassuring comfort-food predictability, with familiar characters in familiar settings acting out familiar story lines. There’s something to be said for a live show that manages to recreate the laid-back atmosphere of your living room.“From the outset, we were trying to parody ‘Saved by the Bell,’ but also trying to parody theater,” Tobly said. “We’ve always felt so far away from Broadway. And we like that.” More

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      ‘Lilies’ Review: A Queer Romantic Drama That Wilts Quickly

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      Michel Marc Bouchard’s melodrama, about an illicit gay love affair in 1912, displays a lot of kookiness and little self-awareness.“Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven; And he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground.”So says Genesis 19. And so goes a recitation by a devout young man traumatized by his repressed homosexuality in “Lilies, or the Revival of a Romantic Drama.” Staged at the Theater Center with a limited audience, this aimless production by the Drama Company NYC depicts a confrontation between two men that reveals how an illicit gay love affair of decades past brought hellfire — and literal fire — to a small Canadian town.It’s the spring of 1952, and an ex-inmate named Simon Doucet (J.J. Miller) has requested a meeting with Bishop Jean Bilodeau (Marc Verzatt). They’re former schoolmates, but this is no cordial reunion; threatening Bilodeau with a knife, Doucet forces him to sit through a staging of the past, watching younger versions of themselves act out something that happened when they were teenagers in the fall of 1912.Bilodeau scoffs and occasionally interjects with protests of the performance, which shows the ill-fated love between young Doucet (a well-cast Hartley Parker) and his best friend, Count Vallier De Tilly (a sensationally anguished Florimond Le Goupil-Maier). Bilodeau uneasily witnesses the sins committed by his younger self (Grant Hale, sanctimonious and perfectly weaselly), a closeted God-fearing boy whose obsession with and jealousy of the couple ultimately destroys them.Under Andrew Benvenuti’s unsteady direction, the majority of the play, written by Michel Marc Bouchard in French and translated by Linda Gaboriau, takes place as a flashback. First performed in 1987, “Lilies” quickly sloughs off realism to present the play not as a true performance but as a kind of living memory. (The simple set, dressed with nine chairs and occasionally tables, leaves it all to our imagination, though Benvenuti’s ungraceful blocking obscures even that view.)It’s a different approach from the director John Greyson’s in the pulpy 1996 Canadian film adaptation, in which Bilodeau visits Doucet in prison and all the actors in Doucet’s play are gay fellow inmates. There, we had a clear perspective and consistent stakes: Though the film’s cinematography blurs the line between the performance in the jail and a fluid recollection of the past, the action is anchored in the present, with the camera alternatively following and mimicking Bilodeau’s gaze.This “Lilies” lacks a clear perspective. It’s less interested in the present-day confrontation between Doucet and Bilodeau and even loses its focus on Bilodeau altogether. The adult Bilodeau spends 90 percent of the play silently sitting in the audience watching his younger self — a waste of an actor and character who is at the center of the tale.It’s a shame, too, that Bilodeau remains so removed because moralistic characters are often candy for performers, who can play with the contradictions that often come with the holier-than-thou archetypes hoping to pray away the skeletons in their own closets. The script doesn’t allow for much introspection. In fact, the writing feels gleaned from a mix of gay fan fiction and daytime soaps. At one point, a Parisian baroness magically appears via hot-air balloon; there are also two murders, a Bonnie-and-Clyde-style escape and a whole lot of arson.Then there’s the all-male cast of 11. Like the film, the men perform the female roles in drag. The move is intentionally subversive, as a way to normalize queer relationships within a story setting where such relationships are taboo. The effect is campy, à la Edna Turnblad, but how much of that is overtly drawing from the performative tradition of camp and how much the production is stumbling headfirst into hyperaffected melodrama is unclear.Bill Morton, left, as the delightfully odd Countess Marie-Laure de Tilly, with Le Goupil-Maier. The roles of women are performed by men in drag. Andrew Daniel DickThere is a parade of queer tropes that seems to escape critique or interrogation: the Christian boys’ school with the obviously closeted priests; the self-hating gay boy; a homophobic father; a fiancée who is actually a beard; a tragic queer death.Bill Morton as Vallier’s mother, the Countess Marie-Laure de Tilly, is a delightful wise fool, floating across the stage with a performance as flowery and bonkers — and occasionally knowing — as a Canadian Blanche DuBois. But this performance is an uncomfortable contrast with Miller’s stiff and unconvincingly threatening Doucet, as though they’re characters taken from two totally different plays. At what point does a crazy countess play too closely to the tired role of the histrionic gay diva? And when does J.P. Ross’s snooty Baroness Lydie-Anne de Rozier, with her arch purrs and snide remarks, become a performance of the catty gay man stereotype?In this way and others, “Lilies” seems to be attempting a balancing act without consciously knowing it. In one scene, a character is given a pearly white clawfoot tub for his birthday, and two boys end up in the bathtub kissing and embracing. The scene feels objectifying, and a cheesy piano accompaniment exacerbates that impression; it isn’t as much about the love between the boys as it is about the novelty of their sex, which would be fine if the scene — and the rest of the play — were more clearly filtered through the shame and desire of Bilodeau’s gaze, but as it is, there’s just a clumsy bit of fully naked splash time.How seriously does “Lilies” take its melodrama, how earnestly does it wear its clichés? The baroque turns and flourishes of the script indicate some level of self-awareness (as when one character theatrically crashes an engagement party dressed as Julius Caesar), yet the deadpan declarations and rebuttals of love suggest austere intentions.Once “Lilies” reaches its conclusion — which is so predictable and pat, and in this production so abrupt that there was an unsure beat before the audience’s applause — the impression it leaves is of an old theme with a few flamboyant variations. Doucet’s play within the play ultimately persuades Bilodeau to confess his misdeeds — but the play I saw? Much less persuasive.Lilies or The Revival of a Romantic DramaThrough June 14 at the Theater Center, Manhattan; tdcnyc.org More