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On Monday, February 22, Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS added a new and unique event to its calendar. Though many have seen the previous four editions of BROADWAY BACKWARDS, this was the first time BC/EFA produced this star-studded, gender-bending event, benefiting both BC/EFA and The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center, this year at Lincoln Center Theater’s Vivian Beaumont.
And it did live up to its tag-line, “The he-sang, she-sang event of the season!” With dazzling performances from an impressive line-up of stars boasting four Tony Awards and 20 Tony Award nominations and led by Director/Choreographer Robert Bartley and Musical Director Wayne Barker, BROADWAY BACKWARDS raised the roof and a record-breaking $186,780, nearly $20,000 more than the previous edition of the event.
 
Shortly after BROADWAY BACKWARDS got underway, while Florence Henderson was leading the ensemble in a rousing, over-the-top boy-boy/girl-girl rendition of the classic Music Man song, “Shipoopi,” a team of police stormed the Vivian Beaumont stage led by television and Broadway funny man, “Sergeant Richard Kind” who promptly announced that BROADWAY BACKWARDS 5 must “cease and desist” – explaining that men singing about men and women singing about women, “propagates same-sex marriage.” A key-stone cops-like chase and ensued resulting in Florence getting knocked out after being hit on the head by one of the officer’s billy clubs. And thus began Florence’s extended “BROADWAY BACKWARDS dream sequence” featuring many of the great songs of the legitimate stage… reinterpreted in a different, somewhat gayer context.
The Classics Reinterpreted
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Hunter Ryan Herdlicka and Dan Butler teamed up in a “Come Up To My Place” from On the Town as a naive young sailor eager to see the sites of New York City and a cabby desperately in need of companionship.
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Julia Murney, star of the Manhattan Theatre Club/Andrew Lippa The Wild Party, interpreting her co-star’s song from that musical, an aching and heartbreaking rendition of “What Is It About Her?”
Raul Esparza channeled Garland with a stunning and heart-wrenching “The Man That Got Away” from the film A Star is Born.
Famous for her Tony Award winning performance in Miss Saigon, but also as the voice of many Disney princesses, Lea Salonga’s vocally pure and emotionally devastating “Out There” by Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz from the animated musical The Hunchback of Notre Dame left the audience craving more.
Len Cariou and Lee Roy Reams stopped the show with humorous, yet surprisingly sensitive rendition of “I Remember It Well” from the Lerner and Loewe classic Gigi. Ugly Betty and Encores! Girl Crazy star Becki Newton played a certain traveling saleslady visiting a small Iowa town wooing and, in this case, “outing” a certain prudish librarian, played by Barbara Angeline, in “Marion the Librarian.” Nick Adams, Timothy W. Bish and Adam Perry dreamed of someday leaving the Fandango Ballroom for a better life, dancing up a storm in the classic Sweet Charity number “There’s Gotta Be Something Better Than This.”
Mario Cantone proved himself a song and dance man alongside a chorus of hunky dancers with the show-stopping Kander and Ebb song “Where You Are” from Kiss of the Spider Woman. Host Florence Henderson showed that she is equally as agile, leading the female singing and dancing ensemble of 25 in the classic Guys and Dolls showstopper, “Luck Be A Lady.”
Other highlights included:
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