Chris Collins-Pisano and nd Jenny Lee Stern Photo by Carol Rosegg

Fast-forward 42 years, and Forbidden Broadway, or its latest edition, Forbidden Broadway: Merrily We Stole a Song, has evolved. Fred Barton, God bless him, is still at the piano, and Gerard Alessandrini, God bless him, too, is still in his default mode, mock-and-ridicule. But we're in the more substantial Theater 555, and the production values have, if not skyrocketed, notched up several levels: a parade of spoofy quick-change costumes that must eat up a lot of Velcro, enough wigs to populate five Broadway musicals, and mics, oh, a lot of mics.

It's a bit of a trade-off. This Forbidden Broadway is frequently hilarious, and the production upgrade makes it as much a visual experience as an aural one. Yet there's a whiff of more-is-less. The bare-bones environment at Palsson's felt more subversive. And the lyrics were certainly easier to hear.

There's plenty to enjoy. Let's start with the cast: Chris Collins-Pisano, Danny Hayward, Nicole Vanessa Ortiz, and Forbidden Broadway veteran Jenny Lee Stern are all insanely talented. (Generously, the standbys, Katherine Penny and John Wascavage, also receive star billing.) And Alessandrini has artfully paid dis-homage to Broadway both old and new, beginning with the opening, with usherette Stern admonishing the audience, "Sit Down, You're Blocking the Aisle!" ("But in Act Two, someone Skyped with their pet shih tzu... They wrestled me, so I had to use jiujitsu.") The quartet's impersonations are, if not always dead-on, never less than close enough, and some are uncanny. I'll long treasure Stern's Patti LuPone in one of Ian Joseph's always-impeccable wigs, snarling, "And here's to the bitches who mock/ Every little bit/ And if people take sneaky pictures or talk/ Watch me throw a fit!"

There's even, and this is a Forbidden Broadway first, something of a through line: Roger Bart (Collins-Pisano) and Casey Likes (Hayward), on a Back to the Future-esque time journey in set designer Glenn Bassett's cutout DeLorean, visit Oscar Hammerstein II's Doylestown farm in 1945 and meet a teenage Stephen Sondheim (Stern), with catastrophic results for the future of musical theatre. It's the springboard for a whole lotta Sondheim, including some intricate parodies of songs like "Old Friends" and "Franklin Shepard, Inc."

Fun–but with such an onrush of lyrics, what are probably some very funny lines are bound to get lost, and they do. Sound designer Andy Evan Cohen, though it's not as egregious as at several other current musicals, has over-miked to the point of frequent unintelligibility. Which leaves us enjoying Barton's snappy arrangements and Dustin Cross's elaborate costumes, which are quite up to the Forbidden Broadway standard set by the legendary Alvin Colt. But we hate missing the jokes.

They do come thick and fast, and you'll probably have a rollicking good time anyway. Most current musicals and a couple of current plays, and several of their stars, get roasted. Collins-Pisano is a giggle-inducing Cole Escola, Ortiz gets to inhabit both & Juliet's Lorna Courtney and Audra, Hayward makes mincemeat of Eddie Redmayne, and Stern can do anything; I especially loved her deranged Gayle Rankin. And Alessandrini is an old hand at juxtaposing the classic and the new: If you ever wondered how Hell's Kitchen could transmogrify into The Music Man, find out here. He even brings up some Broadway trivia that only the most afflicted among us will recognize, like Sondheim's disdain for Lorenz Hart's rhyming of "company" with "bump a knee." ("It's not my kind of rhyme," he told an interviewer, then proceeded to hook "personable" with "coercin' a bull." I'd love to know the difference.) There's also a devastating sendup, set to Tchaikovsky, of Lincoln Center, where "Ev'ry season/ At the Beaumont/ There's a mo-mont/ You will cringe." I could quote Gerard all night.

Yet there's one more problem, possibly an unavoidable one: To many of us, the classics are just better, and richer in parody potential, than what's playing now. The scores of The Outsiders and The Great Gatsby aren't up to the likes of Gypsy or Follies, and naturally, spoofing them won't have the same resonance as riffing on Sweeney Todd or West Side Story. And while Alessandrini gives Jeremy Jordan and Maleah Joi Moon and Brody Grant a hearty pummeling, we do miss his digs at Channing and Merman and Patinkin. All in all, I'd call Merrily We Stole a Song a slightly lower-rung Forbidden Broadway. The good news is, even a lower-rung Forbidden Broadway is the equivalent of an upper-rung anything else.