A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM
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In light of this history, Goodman’s current 1988-’89 season closer, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, feels like a retreat from or even betrayal of the theater’s mission. A large, well-financed nonprofit house like Goodman should be committed to the most selective standards in its choice of material. A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, a fairly common item in the schedules of second- and third-tier stock, community, and college theaters, is hardly in the same league as Sunday in the Park With George or Pal Joey.
So why is Goodman doing it? Presumably, director Frank Galati was attracted by the opportunities for comic invention the show offers. The script’s authors, Larry Gelbart and Burt Shevelove, deliberately left plenty of room for actors and directors to contribute their own visual and verbal gags. Shevelove, the script’s senior writer and a scholar of the odd and the eccentric, intended the show as an homage to pre-Christian Roman comedy and to its 20th-century descendants, vaudeville and burlesque. Both forms relied heavily on the individual personalities of the performers, and this was constructed as a flexible vehicle to accommodate whoever was playing it.
More than 25 years after its Broadway premiere, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum stands as an important show mainly because it was Stephen Sondheim’s first major effort as both composer and lyricist. Suffice it to say that Sondheim has improved; the score is a forgettable throwaway compared to the other pop cartoon musicals of its era (Bye Bye Birdie, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, Stop the World, I Want to Get Off, etc), not to mention Sondheim’s own subsequent work.
