Not That Funny

I was recently reading a review of A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum.  It was a minor review of a minor production at a minor website, so no need to get excited.  Still, I found the writer's miscomprehension fascinating.

For instance:

...the first act seems to drag, while the second act ends surprisingly quickly.  Much of this is likely the fault of the book by Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart, which frontloads most of the plot and songs before intermission.

Poor, dumb Shevelove and Gelbart, don't know how to write a show.  Sure, it was a big hit on Broadway, and has amused millions since in countless productions, but they just don't understand pacing. (And I like how she lets composer Stephen Sondheim off the hook.)

Okay, the writer thought the first act dragged.  Maybe it's the production, maybe she just doesn't like the book.  But it's simply a fact that musicals written during the age of Rodgers and Hammerstein (let's say from the early 40s to the mid-60s) tend to have long first acts and short second acts.

During that era, straight plays had three acts, with the second act curtain falling on a crisis to be resolved in act 3.  In musicals, which had two acts, the first act would establish the setting, characters and situation and take us up to a crisis, and the second act would resolve the crisis.  This makes for long first acts and short second acts.  Anyone writing reviews of musicals should know this.

What's more, Forum is a farce.  As composer Stephen Sondheim has noted, early in the show there's time to get to know everyone, and have character moments, but as the farce picks up steam, there's less and less chance to fit in a song.  By the second half of the second act, which is essentially a long chase, there's simply no time, before the finale, to have a musical number--it would stop the action.  Perhaps Shevelove and Gelbart (and Sondheim) knew what they were doing.

The reviewer's not done:

The show itself hasn't aged well, and it's hard not to cringe at its depictions of women and sexual politics.[...] It doesn't sit well that every female character on stage is a courtesan, except Domina, who, as her names suggests, is little more than a nag.  Likewise, it's a bit jarring that the topic of slavery is played so blatantly for laughs.

It is true, the female characters are rather one-dimensional.  But so are the male characters.  This is a farce, and they're all types that go back to the comedies of Roman playwright Plautus, whose work inspired the show.  Which means one of the female characters is a naïve courtesan and the other a termagant. (The rest of the women are chorus.) But the males characters are also types--a wily slave, a cringing slave, a braggart soldier, a naïve young man, his lascivious father, an avaricious procurer and a bewildered old man.

Perhaps these mainstays of the stage, basic comic types that have been enjoyed for millennia, no longer play in our day and age. But if so, it may say more about the times than the show.

More bizarre, though, is the reviewer's trouble with making light of slavery.  This play is set in ancient Rome--I think we're far enough removed that we can handle it.  And it's a farce we're talking about--people are threatened with disembowelment and we can still laugh.

I might add that the plot is driven by the lead character's desire for freedom--a modern twist added by Shevelove and Gelbart.  In the original farces of Plautus there were plenty of slaves, but it was such a common institution then that plots weren't build around hope of emancipation.