I once asked in this column, with typical modesty, who you would vote for as the best drama critic in town. Taking a wild shot in the dark, who, my children, is the wisest, wittiest of them all?

The answer is … Gerard Alessandrini.

And you thought it was me! (You always do!) But I know my place. Put simply, Mr. Alessandrini is the best and funniest critic of Broadway musicals in history. He’s the creator, writer and co-director of my favorite show on earth, Forbidden Broadway, and I love the guy.

I always think understatement works best, don’t you? But no show has consistently given me more pleasure over the years than Mr. Alessandrini’s little revue that spoofs and skewers the higher lunacies of Broadway. Even Broadway itself has ripped it off (most shamelessly in Spamalot).

Forbidden Broadway has become a New York institution with just four exceptional performers and a pianist on a postage-stamp-size stage (with a tinsel curtain). It was Mr. Alessandrini’s inspired device to add his own surpassing, sometimes withering lyrics to the existing show tunes, with love and affection and the smile of a charming assassin.

So it comes as shocking news for a lot of us that Mr. Alessandrini has decided to hang up his scalpel after 27 glorious years, once his latest edition, Forbidden Broadway Goes to Rehab, ends its run at the 47th Street Theatre on Jan. 15. Say it ain’t so! Or as the upset Carmen Ghia puts it in The Producers: “If you want to send an arrow through my heart—bull’s-eye!” I’ve been seeing the show as a necessary ritual and treat for some 20 years, looking forward to each new version as if my partial sanity depended on it.

But if Forbidden Broadway really is to end its record-breaking run despite its continued vitality, Mr. Alessandrini’s reasons are understandable. They tell us much about the state of Broadway he lampoons.

The target hasn’t changed; it’s the shows that got smaller. Mr. Alessandrini’s worthy targets have always been the sacred cows of major musicals and recognizable stars—as opposed to, say, a mermaid or the suicidally named [title of show]. The Disneyfied Broadway for kiddywinks isn’t for him. Hence this season’s hilarious sendup of dear old sanctimonious Mary Poppins with her ever-so-precise British vowel sounds:

It’s stupid-careless-fictional-

     nonsensical

verboseness

Even though the sound of it may

     give it

grandioseness

So damn cute you choke on all the

     sappy sweet

glucoseness

Stupid-careless-fictional-non

     sensical

verboseness!

MR. ALESSANDRINI has also confessed that lampooning increasingly mediocre musicals has become increasingly difficult. Still, he never lets us down! Take the unfortunate case of A Tale of Two Cities, which has just opened on Broadway. Frankly, this poor son of Les Misérables is staggeringly bad. Its song titles alone echo the now dated Sturm und Drang of Les Miz and Lloyd Webber, signaling what’s wrong: “The Shadows of the Night,” “You’ll Never Be Alone,” “If Dreams Came True” (as opposed to Les Miz’s “I Dreamed a Dream”).

Musical adaptations of Dickens’ impossibly crowded novels would be challenging enough at the best of times. (Lionel Bart most notably succeeded with his terrific Oliver.) Arriving on Broadway from Florida, A Tale of Two Cities has a book, music and lyrics by a first-time composer, Jill Santoriello. She tells us gamely in Playbill that she began writing it during the first Reagan administration. (“Never give up on your dreams!”)

Be that as it may, I’m afraid the tedium of the production left me struggling to think up a witty adaptation of Dickens’ immortal line, “It is a far, far better thing that I do …” Words failed me, but Mr. Alessandrini rises to the occasion in his lethal sendup of the show. At the close of a wicked impersonation of its star, James Barbour, he gives him the effortless line, “It is a far, far lesser show that I do than I have ever done …”

FORBIDDEN BROADWAY never hits below the belt. Well, almost never. It depends how low the belt is. “Old Young Frankenstein,” nails the overhyped Mel Brooks musical to a spirited version of its big number, Irving Berlin’s “Puttin’ on the Ritz”—

If you’re blue and you don’t know

     where

To go to why don’t you go

Where you can sit

Puttin’ up with shit!

The new edition of Forbidden Broadway reprises and polishes old favorites. The performers from The Lion King who play giraffes appear in neck braces to sing “Can You Feel the Pain Tonight?” Or the horny stars and Wendla’s song in Spring Awakening:

Mama who bore me

In Spring Awakening

I touch my boobies

Every time I sing

There are side-splittingly funny new sketches, of course. Among my favorites—the frightening, falsetto parody of Jersey Boys titled Jersey Goys; a dazzling adaptation of Candide’s “Glitter and Be Gay” retitled “Glitter and Be Glib,” which comes during an expert impersonation of the trilling, somewhat narcissistic cutesy-pie, Kristin (“I’m popular!”) Chenoweth; or the affectionate parody of Lincoln Center’s nostalgic production of The Sound of Music to the lyric, “Some endangered species.”

Mr. Alessandrini even makes a rare excursion into straight drama with a smashing parody of the overheated, sub-O’Neill August: Osage County, and the forthcoming Equus, with Harry Potter’s Daniel Radcliffe performing a striptease to “Let Me Entertain You” from Gypsy. (“Let me enter naked/ Let me make you drool …”)

All this—and Patti LuPone, too! Mr. Alessandrini is on a roll with what he calls “this year’s annual revival of Gypsy.” Ms. LuPone, the well-known diva—not to mention Gypsy’s lyricist, Stephen Sondheim, god of the devout followers whom Mr. Alessandrini nicknames “Sondheim-ites”—bring out the very best in him. (“Some people think I’m the best/ And it’s true I eclipse the rest …”) Ms. LuPone’s song to “Small World,” delivered in faint praise of her Herbie, played by the cowed Boyd Gaines, is a delirious bonus:

Funny—

You’re an actor who’s tasted

Critical praise so far

Funny—

Here in Gypsy you’re wasted

Small part isn’t it?

The four superlative performers in Forbidden Broadway Goes to Rehab are Christina Bianco, Jared Bradshaw, Gina Kreiezmar and Michael West. The accomplished pianist and musical director is David Caldwell, and the trusty co-director with Mr. Alessandrini is Phillip George.

All things are parodiable; and all good things must come to an end, I guess. If this is to be the last Forbidden Broadway, Gerard Alessandrini has created something wonderful, and now he’s created a chasm. Because there’s no one who can possibly take his place.

And so—

I had a dream

A dream about you, Gerard

It’s gonna come true, Gerard

You think that you’re through,

     but Gerard—

You’ll be swell! You’ll be great

You’re gonna bring back your

     show on a plate!

The ghost of Saint Ethel Merman shall return to the oldest established permanent floating crap game in New York! “Hiya, everybody! Swell! Gee, but it’s good to be back!” And so shall Forbidden Broadway, Mr. Alessandrini’s forever welcome, absolutely essential gem of a show.

jheilpern@observer.com

Should you not know the outcome of this foregone conclusion, let me keep you in suspense no longer. His name is Gerard Alessandrini.

And you thought it was me! If by chance you are murmuring to yourself, "Gerard who?"–do not pass go and proceed to jail immediately. The brilliant Mr. Alessandrini is the best and funniest Broadway critic there has ever been in history. He's the creator, writer and co-director of my favorite show on earth, the parody of Broadway musicals Forbidden Broadway , and I love him.

I always think understatement is a good thing, don't you? But every season, I find myself eagerly looking forward to each new edition of his revue as if my partial sanity depended on it. (It does. And so, I trust, does yours.) Let us not hold back, then. There's the Chrysler building, there's Elaine's and there's Forbidden Broadway . There might be other irreplaceable things in town. But I can't think of them right now. The good Mr. Alessandrini never lets us down. Come what may on Broadway, he always has us convulsed with laughter. He defines the irresistible higher lunacies of showbiz for us. He goes where no drama critic has dared to tread before. He slams everything ! With love and horror, of course.

He possesses both the affection of a true fan and the smile of an assassin. He likes what he skewers (sort of). He proves that all things can be parodied. But so much ? Everything is fair game in that oldest established permanent floating crap game in New York–but of late, they're handing it to him on a plate. Mr. Alessandrini cheerfully nails one and all, adapting his own witty, sometimes withering lyrics to the original show tunes. Thus, in the current edition, Forbidden Broadway 2001: A Spoof Odyssey , which has just opened at the Stardust Theatre on the fringes of Broadway itself, Brian Stokes Mitchell and Marin Mazzie from Kiss Me, Kate waltz onstage singing a lusty new version of "Wunderbar": "Would be stars / Would be stars! …" And the startling appearance of Cheryl Ladd as Annie Oakley in Annie Get Your Gun inspires a lethally new lyric to "There's No Business Like Show Business": "I've no business in show business …."

There's the ritual, wired appearance of Liza Minelli. ("Can we be serious for a moment? Do the words 'Third Reich' mean anything to you? Because they do to me.") There's the ever-modest Patti LuPone ("I tour all alone / And sing monotone / Making you groan / Being LuPone"). And, as always, there's the beloved ghost of Broadways past, the old belter Ethel Merman, this time in duet with Sir Elton John, who admires her dress.

"Swell! Gee, but it's good to be back!" says the irrepressible Ethel, who was present at the birth of theater, when Broadway was a muddy swamp and chorus boys had to forage for sustenance. "Hi ya, everybody!" She then turns to say to Elton enthusiastically: "You know I love a good old-fashioned show tune, don't you?" And Elton replies, "Not really…."

To be sure, Mr. Alessandrini looks back nostalgically to the good old days of pre-Disneyfied Broadway, before the Great Corporate White Way became over-cute, over-miked, over-sold and under-age. An inspired, lunatic silliness is one of the revue's appealing calling cards–from crashing toy helicopters to the endlessly revolving dizzy cast of Les Misérables , to the "show as old time / Worn as it could be"–the now-downsized Beauty and the Beast :

Just a little change

Says the Disney beast

Profits growing thin

Downsizing is in

Beauty 's been decreased.

This season, the send-ups that had me on the floor with laughter were a frantic Aida ("Cheesy" and "Elaborate Sets"), Les Miz ("Ten Years More") and a Lion King with its cast of elaborately costumed lions and giraffes wearing neck braces ("Can you feel the pain tonight?"). As we invariably think at Forbidden Broadway , the immensely talented cast of four appears on the postage-stamp-size stage to be more gifted–and more fun–than anyone on Broadway. All thanks to trusty Christine Pedi, to Tony Nation and Danny Gurwin, and to Felicia Finley in her super debut with the company.

This much I know. If it's time for Forbidden Broadway , all's well with the world–nearly. Which brings us, reluctantly, to the opening of Seussical, The Musical at the Richard Rodgers. Or as Mr. Alessandrini puts it in his spoof of The Music Man :

Oh, we got trouble!

Right here in New York City

Right here in New York City

With a capital T

And that rhymes with D

And that stands for DULL!

IS THERE A DR. IN THE HOUSE?

Seussical hadn't yet opened when I saw Forbidden Broadway , and Mr. Alessandrini made only a passing, prescient reference to it: "Now the Cat in the Hat's here / Validating your worst fear…." But I'm afraid that "dull" would be putting it quite kindly for this most troubled new musical.

The bad word of mouth before its opening–the numerous firings and departures, including the loss of its director, Frank Galati, whose name still appears in the program although he left the show in Boston–weren't the healthiest sign. But flops have been salvaged at the last minute before. In fact, you find yourself wishing Seussical well–hoping those fixed, desperate, beaming smiles glued to the faces of the game performers could make all the problems, all the charmless, ill-conceived Technicolor Munchkinland goo of it go away.

But it won't. Based on the works of Dr. Seuss, and conceived by lyricist Lynn Ahrens and composer Stephen Flaherty (with Eric Idle of Monty Python), the piece turns out to be less Seuss, more low-rent Disney. Forget that the vulgar costumes by William Ivey Long actually make rent boys out of monkeys. We may wonder from the outset whether adults would wish to see a musical involving a love affair between a cute little bird and a wan elephant. And if so, why? The children at the performance I attended seemed pretty unexcited by the mild, token story cobbled together from Seuss' Horton the elephant and naughty Jo-Jo and the invisible Whos et al.

We may wonder, too, why they would cast a mime as the star of a musical. David Shiner is without question a wonderful mime, but one feels for him and his Cat in the Hat here. His genius resides in his untamable risky anarchy, like the Cat's. But they've gone and shackled him! They've reined in his joyful, subversive free spirit–in the name of what?

Sweetness is all, harmless, unimaginative and cheap–like the relentlessly bouncy tunes, the cheesy, blindingly lit jungle that scarcely suggests a jungle at all, the familiar, dated disco choreography, the modest, intelligent Seussian statements now writ large and blatant and patronizingly "child-like" for unhappy families on Broadway.