A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum (2001)

Show Info and Crew Members:

Cast:

Director's Notes:

You can start a lively discussion almost anywhere with the observation that musical "comedies" are seldom very funny, even when they try. Somebody somewhere declared that musicals must be big, and bigger, and even bigger. An "epic comedy" of sort is as much an oxymoron as "business ethics."

The key, then, to how well "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum" works may be just that it keeps things small. Very funny, and small. One set, a cast no more than 45 and no roller skating. High school groups (i.e.: Northern Lehigh) can put on this show. Whole generations of "theatre people" have grown up having "done Forum." The jokes will get laughs, the characters will ring true, and its all thanks to Titus Maccius Plautus. Plautus, Roman playwright of the third century BC, invented the comedic wheel. As Larry Gelbart puts it, Plautus "invented all the devices of theatrical comedy... created comic conventions and made use of humorous wordplay within the discipline of well made plays." More than 20 of his 300 plays survive today. So, in the show, does one of his jokes: Miles Gloriosus's assertion "I am a parade!" is nearly 2300 years old.

Beginning in the late 1950's, Gelbart and Burt Shevelove, along with Stephen Sondheim (in his first words-and-music Broadway credit) set themselves the task of writing a new musical that would be wholly in the spirit of Plautus. They would observe the "three unities" time, place, and action, of the classical drama. Broadway had gone down this (Roman) road before, most notably with Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart's wonderful 1938 hit "The Boys From Syracuse," in which Plautus (the Menaechmi) is filtered through Shakespeare ("The Comedy of Errors") and again through the Marx brothers. One of FORUM's intertwined plot threads, siblings separated at birth, revealed and reunited at the crucial moment, indeed comes from The Menaechmi.

When all is said and done, "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum" is simply one of the best musical comedies ever. The original production opened at the Alvin Theatre (now the Neil Simon) on May 1962 with Zero Mostel and Phil Silvers and ran for 964 performances. The fourth revival opened at the St. James Theatre in April of 1996 and ran for another 560 performances with the likes of Nathan Lane, Whoopi Goldberg, and now on tour with Rip Taylor. A side note is that the actors mentioned above, Mostel, Silvers and Lane all have won best actor Tony Awards for their portrayal of Pseudolus.

It has been my pleasure to work with some of Northern Lehigh's finest, helping me along the way to find the Forum. The list of "Thank You's" would fill another ten pages, so to all who have helped and to, of course, the audience "Thank You."

Perhaps the plays ultimate accomplishment lies in the fact that regardless of how many incarnations, Forum has survived. No matter how childishly and absurdly its characters behave, audiences have always been able to look upon them with forgiveness and a good deal of affection. Self love, after all, is quite understandable.

"We shall employ every device we know in our desire to divert you," says Pseudolus (as Prologus) and so they do.

Enjoy the show!