Roman Holiday


In 2013, Hannah Hessel commissioned me to write some program notes for the Shakespeare Theatre's production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, a show dear to my heart ever since I appeared as a Protean in the 1988 Brophy/Xavier production of same. I filed a longer piece than Shakespeare Theatre was able to run, but I still have the original piece. Here it is in its entirety, and it's a pretty little picture if I say so myself.
  
The play title Mostellaria is likely to mean nothing to anyone but classical scholars, while Miles Gloriosus and Pseudolus will ring a bell with contemporary theatergoers not as titles but as character names from the 51-year-old musical theater classic A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. But it is in those three simply titled comedies by the Roman playwright/adaptor Titus Maccius Plautus (254-184 BC) that Forum had its collegiate pre-origins in the years before World War II. Playwright Burt Shevelove recalled in a program note for a Forum revival:
I was a first-year student in the Department of Drama at Yale University. Richard O’Connell (later to become the authorized translator of Lorca’s plays) was directing Plautus’ Mostellaria as his master’s thesis. He had conceived it as a Broadway musical comedy, and I wrote the lyrics for the production. I remember one of the songs was called “A Couple of Greeks on a Roman Holiday.” It was that kind of show.
Shevelove’s memory is sound: The year was 1938, and the work’s full title was “Plautus Potpourri: A Roman Holiday, Adapted from Plautus’ Mostellaria (The Haunted House).” Setting Plautus to music became something of a pet notion of Shevelove’s: In 1942, as a resident director at Yale, he wrote the book and lyrics for When In Rome, adapted from the Plautus plays Miles Gloriosus, about a swaggering Greek soldier, and Pseudolus, about a conniving slave.
Plautus

The idea didn’t resurface until the late 1950s, when Shevelove, as he recalled it, was part of a late-night bull session among fellow playwrights and TV writers in which the topic of “the lack of low comedy on Broadway” came up, and he began to wax nostalgic about his New Haven experiments. He said that another young writer at this confab, composer/lyricist Stephen Sondheim—who had by then already penned the lyrics for West Side Story and tried his hand at television writing—“became wildly excited” about doing the score for a Plautus-based musical by Shevelove and another colleague in the group, Larry Gelbart, and the rest is theater history. (For what it’s worth, Sondheim has disputed this instant-inspiration scenario, and indeed the story that emerges from other sources is more prosaic, with Sondheim himself first hearing Shevelove’s idea, then sampling the Plautus originals before becoming excited, wildly or otherwise, and enlisting director/choreographer Jerome Robbins as an ally before Gelbart came aboard.)

If Sondheim was happy to discover Plautus, co-librettist Gelbart was positively ecstatic. As he later wrote in an introduction to the published script:
What a treat he was to research! How incredibly Plautus’ aged, ageless writings based on men’s gift for silliness, for pomposity and hypocrisy, have survived; how well it all stood up, the comedy that would serve as fodder not only for the theater, but for future stand-up comedians as well. Digging about as archaeologists might have, what unbelievable treasures we found in his plays, a catacomb filled with nothing but funnybones...I believe it is safe to say that there is not a joke form, comic character, or farcical situation that exists today that does not find its origin in Plautus’ work.
The homework may have been a laugh, but the gestation of Forum was famously arduous, taking more than four years of writing—not quite non-stop, as the writers took on other assignments in the interim between beginning work in 1957 and the show’s first production in 1962, but rough going nonetheless. One hurdle was the familiar behind-the-scenes heavy lifting of courting producers and directors (Robbins got cold feet, George Abbott stepped in, Robbins returned to rescue a few ailing numbers, etc.), which in this case had the historically significant effect of essentially creating the musical workshop process; Sondheim thinks Forum may have been the first musical to get regular private read-throughs as its writing developed, rather than being forged in the unforgiving crucible of a rehearsal-and-production schedule.

Adding to the show’s hard sell was its unique conception; if Broadway was low-comedy-deficient, as Forum’s writers had diagnosed, it had accordingly little interest in taking their medicine. As Gelbart put it:
Over the years, Broadway, in its development of the musical comedy, had improved the quality of the former at the expense of a good deal of the latter...The Rodgerses and Harts and Hammersteins, the Lerners and Loewes, brilliant men of music and artists of great refinement, had created a vulgarity vacuum, a space we were happy, even anxious to fill.
Shevelove recalled that “it was difficult to explain to people what the intention of the show was,” and that the notion of a Broadway musical with a single set, let alone a single set of costumes, was considered perverse by the standards of the day.

Perhaps Forum’s biggest challenge, though, was the construction of its farcical plot, looted from elements and archetypes of Plautus and stitched together with original material. Broadly speaking, it concerns the efforts of a scheming slave, Pseudolus, to pair his young master Hero with a courtesan, Philia, who’s already promised to the strapping Roman captain, Miles Gloriosus. Complications entangle Hero’s lecherous father, Senex, also in thrall to Philia, and Senex’s jealous wife, Domina, ever on the alert for her husband’s infidelity, as well as the brothel proprietor Marcus Lycus, a high-strung slave named Hysterium, and a neighboring geezer, Erronius, on a quest to find his orphaned twins. “You have to work it out almost on graph paper so you know what is going on,” said Shevelove of the script, and Gelbart later wrote:
If one could take Forum apart, unscrew the back of it, so to speak, it would be not unlike looking at the works of a computer or the jumble of different-colored wires telephone repairmen deal in. The play is that dense, that tangled. Add or subtract one character and his or her absence or altered presence affects the behavior of every other character in the piece.
Sondheim has called the result of the librettists’ detailed work the “tightest, most satisfyingly plotted, and gracefully written farce I’ve ever encountered,” and elsewhere has said, “Everybody thinks that it was whipped up over a weekend because it plays so easily. The plotting is intricate, the dialogue is never anachronistic, and there are only two or three jokes—the rest is comic situation. It’s almost like a senior thesis on two thousand years of comedy.”

The composer/lyricist has a much lower opinion of his own contribution, however, feeling that his score and the script don’t match, and pointing out, reasonably, that “farces are express trains; musicals are locals.” Sondheim protests too much, of course; try to imagine Forum without its sprightly score, and you have another fine theatrical curiosity fit to join Plautus on the academic shelf, not on the musical stage, where Forum has deservedly become a beloved staple. Sondheim’s music, after all, is one of those integrally entwined telephone wires in the show’s layout which couldn’t be extracted without damage to the rest of the mechanism. It’s true that if you reverse the thought experiment above and imagine a concert of Forum songs minus the script, Sondheim’s score may seem relatively trifling, particularly compared to the towering achievements ahead of him. But this inextricability is just further tribute to the songs’ seamless integration within the show’s whirring comedy contraption—it is the musical equivalent of that effortfully achieved seeming effortlessness that Sondheim rightly admires in the show’s book.
A scene from the original production.

Indeed, Sondheim’s brilliantly clever score was unlike anything heard on Broadway at the time, and certainly unlike anything he’s written since. The notion of musicalizing a farce wasn’t entirely novel—Rodgers & Hart turned The Comedy of Errors into The Boys From Syracuse, and Loesser and Abbott made Where’s Charley? out of Charley’s Aunt—but few farces, even many without music, sustain comic momentum as well as Forum does, and the music, far from gumming it up, only seems to smooth it along.

The key here may be that the show’s momentum doesn’t start at a fever pitch but builds masterfully over the course of the show; as Sondheim has pointed out, the first act is thick with songs, while the second act’s climax goes without a song for 20 minutes while the final chase unfolds. This, of course, is a familiar dramaturgical curve; think of the intense pile-up collisions that end many of Shakespeare’s comedies, typically after a series of sequences that include some refreshing pauses and reveries (indeed, often including a number of songs). In the case of Forum, these rests are as essential to the show’s mechanics as any of those carefully calibrated plot pieces; as Shevelove said, “Without the songs, the show would become relentless. It would exhaust you and you wouldn’t get any breathers, any savoring of certain moments.”

There’s an irony in Sondheim making his Broadway songwriting debut with a show in which the songs function more as diversions than as meaty musical scenes in themselves, since the latter approach is the one he learned directly from Oscar Hammerstein II. He seems to view the Forum score, in fact, as something of an apostasy--a necessary Oedipal rebellion against his elder’s influence, perhaps, but also something he’s never quite fully embraced as his own (that the show got Tony Awards for its book and direction, but not even a nomination for his score, seems to have stung him lastingly). Certainly every show he’s written since Forum has advanced the Hammerstein agenda, in the sense of ever refining and intensifying—some might say rarifying—the dramatic substance the musical form can bear. But the formal playfulness of the Forum songs, both in their lyrical dexterity and their musical daring, would become a signature Sondheim trait, and an enduring departure from his mentor, about whom he recently wrote, “In converting audiences to be drawn in by substance rather than style, Hammerstein effectively anesthetized their delight in lyrics for lyrics’ sake.”

Indeed, if some of his later work is characterized by a tension between hefty substance and overweening style, and by a musico-dramatic personality as strong as any opera composer’s, there is no such baggage attending the utter delight and agility of his songs for Forum. The lyrics are full of wordplay of a grace and precision that easily match the book’s elegant construction. And apart from the pumping oompah of the opener, “Comedy Tonight,” and the tittering showstopper “Everybody Ought To Have a Maid”—which manages the neat trick of making us smile indulgently at elderly lechery, in no small part because the song is more about a persistent male fantasy than about actual predation—the show’s music has a curiously ageless quality that dovetails nicely with the librettists’ insistence on avoiding anachronism. It’s true that the overarching style and diction of the entire work place it clearly in the American mid-century, a time when our culture’s ancient vaudeville, Yiddishkeit, and minstrel traditions were morphing into television sketch comedy and the sitcom. But the discipline and sophistication of Forum’s creators in using those traditions as frames, not as the picture itself, have ensured that Forum has an timelessness that may just outdo Plautus himself.

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