Created and written by Gerard Alessandrini. Directed by Ryan Mooney. Musical direction by Sarah Jaysmith. A Fighting Chance production at PAL Theatre on Saturday, January 9. Continues until January 16

If you take your musicals with a grain of salt, you’ll love Forbidden Broadway, which affectionately skewers some of the biggest hits of the past few decades. With this production, the evening flies by and the laughs come easily.

New Yorker Gerard Alessandrini began the Forbidden Broadway industry off-Broadway in 1982 and has continued to update the show, adding spoofs of newer hits, for nearly three decades. This version is a greatest-hits package, featuring pokes at shows as old as Fiddler on the Roof and as recent as Wicked and Hairspray. Alessandrini’s lyrics are consistently hilarious as he takes the piss out of legends from Bob Fosse (“Though the production may be shoddy/Everyone likes a naked body”) to Stephen Sondheim (“I have no peer ’cause I’m so good”). He’s even more merciless with performers: Liza Minnelli, Barbra Streisand, Carol Channing, and Mandy Patinkin are just a few of the folks sent up in this show. Every one of its satirical bullets lands squarely on the mark.

The stage is tiny and there’s not much of a set, but director Ryan Mooney sprinkles in plenty of costume changes and low-budget special effects. (Just wait till you see the chandelier in Phantom of the Opera.) Mooney works his energetic cast at a crisp pace—all are superb singers and fearlessly playful actors—and musical director Sarah Jaysmith provides solid accompaniment on piano. Andrea Bailey mines the moves in “Glossy Fosse” and is deliciously jaded as Cosette in an extended parody of Les Misérables. David Nicks is a hilariously histrionic Mandy Patinkin, and dons ever more outrageous costumes as the evening goes on. Aaron Lau plays a sweet and hapless cat in a send-up of Andrew Lloyd Webber, and he teams up with a charming Natalee Fera for a generic love song (“The Song That Goes Like This”). The standout is Cathy Wilmot, whose whip-smart comic precision enlivens all her parts, which include a washed-up, cigarette-smoking, 30-year-old former Annie and a sloppy but relentlessly grinning Carol Channing.

Whether you’re a rabid fan of musicals or averse to all the hype, this show has something for you. Behind the laughs, there’s lots of love.